It may seem flippant to put it in such straightforward terms, but sometimes things just work. In the context of an artist’s career, it might come as a result of simple creative happenstance – a falling-together of divergent threads, investigations or experiments to create a crystallised, cohesive, energised moment. In other instances, we can trace the strands, the developments, the hints and cues; we can map an artist’s practice from one phase to the next – from one key concern to another – until it reaches its fleeting moments of crux and, dare we use the term, transcendence.
It’s via this lens that we might approach the oeuvre of the late Robert Jacks and, in particular, the works that populate Towards Metropolis. Created from the early 1980s until the early 1990s, these painting offer a confluence of several of Jacks’ key motifs, modes and lines of painterly and conceptual enquiry. They represent one particularly invigorated moment in career that covered so much ground amid the throes of minimalism, seriality, geometric abstraction and, in the very early days, simultaneously elegant and raw ruptures of expressionistic gesture and motif.
- Excerpt from essay by Dan Rule, 2015
