The art of Jacob Kassay
The artful art of Jacob Kassay
Jacob Kassay; shaping the monochrome
Fittingly for a show concerned with musicality, movement and performance, Kassay's L & M solo set the stage for an intriguing series of debuts, reprises and new roles for established performers.
Monochromes in white acrylic and a newly unveiled shade of blush pink (a colour which has since featured in a series of drawings and the artist's website) were teamed with sultry canvases of oxidised silver deposit.
These mesmerising works, created by leaving the canvas unprimed before electro-plating, effectively invert the silver-plate paintings (a mirroring of mirrors) by producing a deeply scorched surface flecked with glittering threads of silver residue (detail, left).
And although an example of this technique had appeared almost a year previously at New York's Mitchell-Innes & Nash gallery, their suggestion of spangled fabrics or shimmering flesh provided a particularly apt addition to Kassay's balletic installation.
The show also featured a new take on the silver works, this time created on a length of paper. The slightly crumpled, curiously raw result failed to convince some critics, but its real importance lay in the artist's efforts to avert over-familiarity; a refusal, despite the phenomenal success of key early pieces, to compromise artistic evolution or drift into predictability.
Kassay's all-white canvases and shaped stretchers had also debuted at Mitchell-Innes & Nash. At L & M, however, a pencilled intersection with the sequence of diptychs (left) seemed to signal a further phase in their development; a suggestive overlap consolidated by a triumphantly enigmatic showing at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in late 2011.
This, Kassay's first exhibition at a public institution in the UK, took on a two-tier format in response to the galleries' distribution over two floors of markedly different character.
While the ground floor space was dedicated to a configuration of silver works embedded within cloth-covered, half-visible wooden structures - a further attempt by the artist to establish a newer, more architectural context for his best-known works (page top) - the upper galleries (converted from a suite of 19th century stately rooms) were almost exclusively occupied by variations on the white monochrome.
Precisely anchored to their surroundings through strategies echoing the mathematical rigour of a neoclassical setting, the resulting installation proved to be one of Kassay's most cerebral, playful and satisfying to date.
If you like this artist's work, you may also like:
