kAREN WILKIN
135
paperines~
and syntheticness of
Poo'rls~s
materials are made to count,
paradoxically, for aesthetic reasons . .
Poons's detractors sometimes,
H~
the geometric clarity of his
dot paintings (which they gener'ally regard as his best work) as
evidence of greater
thoughtfuhies~
artd
control than are visible in his
recent paintings. But the underlying orderliness and perhaps even
the impulse of the dot pictures persist, in buried form, in even the
wildest of his recent works.
Brahms in Rio
develops in a sequence as
rhythmic as the facade of any classical temple, for all the apparent ir–
rationality of its elusive color relationships. Poons treads the
B'e>ti.-na–
ary between art and chaos. When he succeeds, his
pidure~
hit
liRe
~
slam to the solar plexus.
A similar spirit is evident in the work of
Katja
Jacobs, a
German-born painter new to New York, who has a distinguisfiecl ex–
hibition history
IIi
Europe and Canada, where she has lived since the
mid-sixties. Jacobs's crusty abstract paintings were seen at 49th
Parallel, the Center for Cafiadian Contemporary
Art,
last October.
She is evidently an admirer of Pollock and of all-overness, hut her
paintings soon declare
themsel\!'~s
as
a~y~ing
but derivative. they
are quirky, individual and original. Like Poons, whom she knows
and whose work obvioltsly
int~rests h~i\
jacobs interrupts her
S\1£–
faces with f:()llaged elements. The result, however, is not one of
uniform inflection, but of stattato
atc~tion.
I suspect that Jacobsis
fascination with eollage originates in
s~urces
different from those of
many of her colleaguCls. She was trained first as a printtnaker, and
something of the character of the excavated, uneven printing plate
seems to have found its way ifito her paintings.
Jacobs's pictures call up associations with unknown alphabet8)
illegible calligraphy, tribal patterning. Their layers of paint and ap–
plied elements evoke both archaeology and the accumulations and
random associations of the modern-day city, both the palimpsests of
antiquity and the walls where generations of posters and graffiti have
left their mark. That Jacobs's work reads; at first, as all-over paint–
ing probably owes more to color than to structure. Each canvas or
diptych has a single dominant hue - an odd gray-black or ochre, for
example- that unifies what is, in fact, a series of irregularly placed
"events." These images, redolent of tribal and primitive art, are
partly the result of drawing, partly of collaging, and partly of the
way paint spatters and flows . They are never imposed on the ground
but instead seem to emerge from it, to coalesce momentarily and
then to subside into a fluctuating space, like participants appearing
