SEñORES DE LA LUZ
PERSONAJES CLANDESTINOS ESCONDIDOS EN LA LUZ, COLORES E SOMBRAS DE LA OBSCURIDAD.
(Clandestine Personages Hiding in the Light, Colors and Shadows of the Dark)
The spirits come on sunny mornings to a salon made from crinkled up plastic water bottles by English designer Ross Lovegrove, where they celebrate the drama and beauty of their beings, yearning to be recognized and appreciated. They love that I know they exist and relish the opportunities to reveal themselves by participating in my exploration. If you give them a chance and listen carefully, they will convey emotion, personality and tell you about color and light.
They are recognizable to me because of the strong influences imbued in me by Mexican surrealist Alejandro Colunga and the late Houston artist's artist, Bob Bilyeu Camblin, whom along with Tamayo, Siqueiros, Rivera, Matisse, Picasso, Miró, Chagall, de Kooning, Paul Jenkins, Klein, Kline, Rothko, Turrell, Kapoor, Larry Bell, Ken Price, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Earl Staley, Terry Allen, Jesse Lott, Jr., to name a few, who taught and gave me the eye to SEE and recognize them in the myriad of colors of the moment... Many also very much remind me of the dance masks that I encountered in my 11 year project to extract the essence of the Mexican indigenous festival as it existed in the final decade of the millennium.
They are recognizable to me because of the strong influences imbued in me by Mexican surrealist Alejandro Colunga and the late Houston artist's artist, Bob Bilyeu Camblin, whom along with Tamayo, Siqueiros, Rivera, Matisse, Picasso, Miró, Chagall, de Kooning, Paul Jenkins, Klein, Kline, Rothko, Turrell, Kapoor, Larry Bell, Ken Price, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Earl Staley, Terry Allen, Jesse Lott, Jr., to name a few, who taught and gave me the eye to SEE and recognize them in the myriad of colors of the moment... Many also very much remind me of the dance masks that I encountered in my 11 year project to extract the essence of the Mexican indigenous festival as it existed in the final decade of the millennium.
July 2020: Señores del Pandemico
April 2020 Portrait Series
2017 PORTRAIT SERIES
GEORGE O. JACKSON DE LLANO'S PORTRAITS
THAUMATURGY
2018 FOTOFEST EXHIBITION AT THE CARL JUNG CENTER
by FERNANDO CASTRO R.
Portraits typically are depictions of an individual person in the medium of drawing, painting, sculpture or photography. However, not every historical age has found it desirable to depict individuals. Classical Greek artists like Kresilas (480-410 BC) arguably did not depict the individual Pericles in the celebrated portrait bronze statue that once stood at the Athenian Acropolis. Rather he carved the archetype of a strategos —not only a military commander, as some literature has noted, but a zeitgeist leader of Athens. Pliny the Elder said of said portrait, "a work worthy of the title; it is a marvelous thing about this art that it can make famous men even more famous." Although lifelike, an archetype is not exactly an individual; instead, it is an ideal free of the accidental imperfections that make an individual who he is. Hence it is an idealized form we have in our minds of how someone ought to look like given his personality, stature and deeds. George O. Jackson's Portraits from his abstract Thaumaturgy oeuvre probe into the viewer's mind in search for an identification and recognition of his subjects. In a sense they snap onto, at the point of almost pure abstraction, a historical cycle that may have started with archetypes, gone to the discovery of the portrayal of individuals, stylization, expressionism, hyperrealism, impersonation, etc., and the myriad alternatives of contemporary art.
In the context of Jackson's own oeuvre these portraits are the missing link between his abstract work and his ethnographic work; in particular, with his documentary work that shows the ritual use of masks in religious festivities. They reverse the interpretation of photography in the documentary mode in which the photographer acts as a medium between an actual scene he saw and photographed, and the viewer who can benefit from the visual information, to photography in the imaginary mode in which the viewer is invited to interpret imagery according to his own psychological inclinations. The portrayed subject in Jackson's portraits is the one projected onto the image by the viewer.
The viewer's projection of an individual onto a depiction is not that peculiar. It is a moot question how faithful the depictions of the pharaoh Akhenathen in ancient Egypt were. Those depictions were probably a distillation of how the pharaoh looked like, how he wanted to be remembered, how the artists convinced him he looked like, and how his subjects wanted him to look like. In the history of art it is widely accepted that the first known instance of the depiction of actual individuals who were not rulers were the Greco-Roman funeral portraits (circa 1st century AD) of the Fayum district, Egypt. These portraits do not appear to show the individual at the moment of their demise, but at some point in their lives that may have been judged to be their acme. As one probes one of Jackson's portraits, one may read into it a personality that is more exemplary than accurate, a psychological acme.
Some of Jackson's portraits transport us to paintings like Senecio, the 1922 series of paintings by Paul Klee; or Amedeo Modigliani's 1917 more stylized portraits like Blue Eyes (portrait of Madame Jeanne Hébuterne). Yet, as it is expected from abstract imagery, there is something more fluid in Jackson's portraits. That fluidity is akin to the multiplicity of perspectives in Cubist portraits (minus the geometric fragmentation) as is the case in Pablo Picasso's 1936 rendering of Dora Maar. Faces in such cubist portraits may have noses orienting themselves in one direction while mouths and eyes point to a different one. That is what happens in Jackson's abstract works like Untitled Y.
Jackson's portraits do not denote specific persons. As was said above, they function more like psychological archetypes than photographic portraits in the documentary mode. Indeed, they fall off the tradition of photographic portraiture. They invite the participation of the viewer in establishing denotation by psychological association and detection. His abstract portraits may suggest a fearful, pathetic, or sinister character. At times they may even be taken to be several subjects in one form.
It may seem outrageous to propose Jackson's portraits as such, but it is not that farfetched. It is worth remembering Gertrude Stein's telling anecdote and the portrait Picasso made of her. The Spanish painter depicted Stein as a massive figure with clay-like skin staring blankly besides the viewer. Stein famously stated, "I was and I still am satisfied with my portrait. For me, it is I, and it is the only reproduction of me which is always I." To those who objected to her mask-like features, Picasso replied, "Everybody thinks that she is not at all like her portrait, but never mind, in the end she will manage to look just like it." George O. Jackson's portraits leave it up to the viewer to connect them with a particular person, or to themselves. They use the tools of color and form, brightness and shadow to propose an interpretation to the to propose an interpretation to the viewer. At face value, light, color and form are the substance of their difference and materiality.
Fernando Castro R.
Houston, 2017
THAUMATURGY
2018 FOTOFEST EXHIBITION AT THE CARL JUNG CENTER
by FERNANDO CASTRO R.
Portraits typically are depictions of an individual person in the medium of drawing, painting, sculpture or photography. However, not every historical age has found it desirable to depict individuals. Classical Greek artists like Kresilas (480-410 BC) arguably did not depict the individual Pericles in the celebrated portrait bronze statue that once stood at the Athenian Acropolis. Rather he carved the archetype of a strategos —not only a military commander, as some literature has noted, but a zeitgeist leader of Athens. Pliny the Elder said of said portrait, "a work worthy of the title; it is a marvelous thing about this art that it can make famous men even more famous." Although lifelike, an archetype is not exactly an individual; instead, it is an ideal free of the accidental imperfections that make an individual who he is. Hence it is an idealized form we have in our minds of how someone ought to look like given his personality, stature and deeds. George O. Jackson's Portraits from his abstract Thaumaturgy oeuvre probe into the viewer's mind in search for an identification and recognition of his subjects. In a sense they snap onto, at the point of almost pure abstraction, a historical cycle that may have started with archetypes, gone to the discovery of the portrayal of individuals, stylization, expressionism, hyperrealism, impersonation, etc., and the myriad alternatives of contemporary art.
In the context of Jackson's own oeuvre these portraits are the missing link between his abstract work and his ethnographic work; in particular, with his documentary work that shows the ritual use of masks in religious festivities. They reverse the interpretation of photography in the documentary mode in which the photographer acts as a medium between an actual scene he saw and photographed, and the viewer who can benefit from the visual information, to photography in the imaginary mode in which the viewer is invited to interpret imagery according to his own psychological inclinations. The portrayed subject in Jackson's portraits is the one projected onto the image by the viewer.
The viewer's projection of an individual onto a depiction is not that peculiar. It is a moot question how faithful the depictions of the pharaoh Akhenathen in ancient Egypt were. Those depictions were probably a distillation of how the pharaoh looked like, how he wanted to be remembered, how the artists convinced him he looked like, and how his subjects wanted him to look like. In the history of art it is widely accepted that the first known instance of the depiction of actual individuals who were not rulers were the Greco-Roman funeral portraits (circa 1st century AD) of the Fayum district, Egypt. These portraits do not appear to show the individual at the moment of their demise, but at some point in their lives that may have been judged to be their acme. As one probes one of Jackson's portraits, one may read into it a personality that is more exemplary than accurate, a psychological acme.
Some of Jackson's portraits transport us to paintings like Senecio, the 1922 series of paintings by Paul Klee; or Amedeo Modigliani's 1917 more stylized portraits like Blue Eyes (portrait of Madame Jeanne Hébuterne). Yet, as it is expected from abstract imagery, there is something more fluid in Jackson's portraits. That fluidity is akin to the multiplicity of perspectives in Cubist portraits (minus the geometric fragmentation) as is the case in Pablo Picasso's 1936 rendering of Dora Maar. Faces in such cubist portraits may have noses orienting themselves in one direction while mouths and eyes point to a different one. That is what happens in Jackson's abstract works like Untitled Y.
Jackson's portraits do not denote specific persons. As was said above, they function more like psychological archetypes than photographic portraits in the documentary mode. Indeed, they fall off the tradition of photographic portraiture. They invite the participation of the viewer in establishing denotation by psychological association and detection. His abstract portraits may suggest a fearful, pathetic, or sinister character. At times they may even be taken to be several subjects in one form.
It may seem outrageous to propose Jackson's portraits as such, but it is not that farfetched. It is worth remembering Gertrude Stein's telling anecdote and the portrait Picasso made of her. The Spanish painter depicted Stein as a massive figure with clay-like skin staring blankly besides the viewer. Stein famously stated, "I was and I still am satisfied with my portrait. For me, it is I, and it is the only reproduction of me which is always I." To those who objected to her mask-like features, Picasso replied, "Everybody thinks that she is not at all like her portrait, but never mind, in the end she will manage to look just like it." George O. Jackson's portraits leave it up to the viewer to connect them with a particular person, or to themselves. They use the tools of color and form, brightness and shadow to propose an interpretation to the to propose an interpretation to the viewer. At face value, light, color and form are the substance of their difference and materiality.
Fernando Castro R.
Houston, 2017
