Robert Jacks: Order and Variation

(Taken from a review of the Curator's presentation and exhibition as part of La Trobe Univeristy NGV ArtNow program in February 2015.)

Jacks Prints Cards collection/Image: NMJoyce 2015

The NGV exhibition of Australian abstract artist Robert Jacks - one that sadly became an artist retrospective - slides the viewer effortlessly from one Escher stairway to the next, logically progressing to the upside-down escalator without quite realising how you got there. 

As you move through the exhibition space NGV curator Beckett Rozentals' fondness for the artists is evident, so much so that she became visibly affected as she described the exhibition design process to La Trobe University ArtNow students. Consisting of 200 prints, paintings, sculptures and books on canvas, wood, rubber, felt and paper, the show demonstrates Jacks' exacting and directed approach. Rozental's descriptions of the artist's meticulous record keeping reveal her inner-archivist's delight for his deliberate methodology. 

The most demonstrative examples of this approach are those works displayed alongside the original Jacks’ painting included in The Field, the ground-breaking 1968 launch exhibition of the reopened National Gallery of Victoria in a new building. Dominating the space is Red Painting, 1968 - a big red painting that looks suspiciously like a big red painting. Get up close and personal however and a graph of carefully graduated tone stepped across the surface is revealed. Presented upon a pedestal before the painting is the exoskeleton of a plain white wooden cube... that looks remarkably like a plain white wooden cube. And lo! Upon closer inspection it proves to be a modulated series of angles cut into wood, graduating from 45 to 90 degrees. It is a deceptively complex work that keeps the eye moving back for second, third and fourth looks, as does the painting.

We then approach a basic square frame, yet another series of graduated angles cut into wood and painted but reduced to just one side of the cube. Finally, we are presented with the logical conclusion in the series. The graph has been completely deconstructed into squares separated out from the painted form and collected into their cubist form like so many playing cards. The graph has been transformed into a collapsed collection of flat wooden squares linked into a flexible chain.

What is remarkable about this series is not only the complexity of carefully calibrated angles but that the first canvas was painted in 1968, and the final chain was completed more than 40 years later. Works conceived in 1968 & then remade in 2000's in their deconstructed form are indicative of an ordered mind picking up a variation and letting it's thread play out through the decades. The grid shape on show in this single room repeats throughout the works on display elsewhere, varying in rhythm, shade and texture.

In her address to the students, Rozentals made mention of Jacks’ huge vinyl record collection and the comparison of his work to the fusion jazz of Miles Davis in the 1960s through to The Necks in the 2000s is a fair one. She says that during his 1970s stint in the New York art scene Jacks spent time with 'all the right people'. The relationship between avant-garde, abstract jazz and Jacks’ minimalist, methodological style is a logical extension of the mutual influence of order and variation manifest in a career spanning five decades.