Notebook II

I’m a bit biased – the color and attitude in Jackie Saccoccio’s Source Concave is right where my head is at these days. This image feels Southern, Mediterranean, Classical and full of light. It’s filled with lyrical beauty. And that wonderful lyricism is also the problem for abstraction of this kind – at this particular time. So in order to be relevant, to NOT be purely decorative – this kind of abstraction has to have an edge – a place for real thought and play within the painterly vision – and Jackie is a master of subtle visual manipulation, of “edge.”
It happens in the way she uses these traditional AbEx/Color Field processes – pours, drips, runs, etc. Jackie is always revealing and concealing these processes, setting one against the other, playing hide and seek – in the same way that Penn and Teller reveal and conceal their “magic.” We are pushed to think about the illusion and where that illusion resides – how it works.
There are always unexpected twists and turns of color and process across the surface. These effects are subtle and can be overlooked in the overall image, but when you drill down into them you can see that they build structure and form into the painting. The dabs of light gray-green moving through the almost muddy puddle in the middle, that subtle horizontal red/pink line just before the bottom of the canvas, the runs of brushed color seen just below the surface – all these small combinations of technique and color building into and out of the pours create an illusion of structured time and space.
It’s a sleight of hand, a trick of the eye – a clever interpretation of precedent leading us to a different kind of conclusion about the way classical American abstraction can work – Johns rather than Frankenthaler, Seurat rather than Monet.