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Jacques Roch's paintings reveal an intense duel between the mind and the instincts. Reds, yellows and blues are gestured passionately on the canvas, revealing a desire to a lyrical approach, while syncopated projections of semi-sexual, semi-social characters are stenciled onto the colorfield, subverting primal beauty into primal delinquency, disclosing an indiscreet sense of absurdity. The repetitious act of transcendence between the lyrical and the absurd is a permutational game where one deliberating action switches half way to another, where limitations become liberations, and liberations dissolve into surface. There is a restrained primitive urge, loaded with sexual inferences, halfway violent, halfway poetic. As Roch follows the path of duality (always on the edge of perverting his own European formalist modes), he invades another world, the one of Breton, with a language of idiosyncratic characters placed on the color field. These personages are not an extension of the background. Technically, they are printed on the canvas, as part of a subsequent process application. Their perverted, yet contained, symbolic imagery does not belong in the apparent "paradise" of lushly painted primary colors contrasted by depths of mixed tones and the dripping of paint. Though, as in Miró's works, they do create a detached narrative of segregated elements, the other side of the mirror, the profane in comparison to the godly. In "Lift II" printed drawings are applied to the background of wide brush strokes (yellows, blues and reds in partially blended color fields), evoking the repetitive pattern of a series of dwarf characters (hanging on breasts, as going up in a lift), uniting a cognitive code of the characters' doings and the endless new possibilities of the aesthetical world. In "Amanda" there is a subtle interconnection between the printed elements and lights and shades, underlining a lyrical victory. Maybe the title, being the name of a woman, already speaks to beauty prevailing over the grotesque. Even the idiosyncratic characters add to the harmony and integrity of the techniques and language in this painting. In "La Guerre des Roses," Roch transport us to a Dantesque "paradise." Flying byomorphic characters are totally inert in a world of "perfect" chaos. They are divided in groups and displayed flowing around a circular form. A feeling of intense motion is brought by the color application, by the bright whites contrasting darker tones. There is a sense of warmth from the gestural and vivid display of colors, while the stenciled figures speak about the static characteristic of the observer.
Jacques Roch's work is represented by Kim Foster Gallery, |