Jay Isaac

I was only vaguely familiar with Jay Isaac’s work when I encountered it last year at his solo show at Paul Petro Contemporary Art. What little I knew of it came from his inclusion in The Power Plant’s prescient and influential show of rising new stars, “The Republic of Love,” with Shary Boyle, Paul P., and Tony Romano in 2003. So in the context of these hyper-aware, savvy young artists I couldn’t help thinking that the pastel, almost post-impressionistic paintings of rowboats, flowers in vases, statues, reclining female nudes, and pastoral landscapes were Isaac’s attempt at a kind of ironic mockery of the process of learning to paint. I was partly right: these paintings did explore his efforts to teach himself to paint from observation, but there was no irony.

In his new exhibition “The Energy of the Sun,” Isaac once again employs a direct, observational approach to almost painfully traditional subjects that unabashedly call to mind artists like Monet, Cezanne and the Group of Seven. There is a portrait of a girlfriend painted with reds and ochres over a luminous yellow ground; pictures of the harbour as seen from his studio window; glowing, radiant flowers in pots floating in the dappled exuberant space of a Bonnard or the encrusted jigsaw-puzzle planes of Vuillard. The paintings are paired-down, immediate and thoroughly lacking in sardonic tongue-in-cheek cleverness. And all this coming from a guy whose previous images of melting, acidcoloured landscapes merged the erotic fantasy kitsch of Frank Frazetta with marshmallow clouds, and Ziggy Stardust fairies and strange abstract geometries with hidden, embedded phrases like “shit funeral.” What happened?

I don’t want to re-hash the story of how Isaac burned out on the excesses of early fame and success. What is important to me is how he transformed a sort of existential crisis into something productive, meaningful, real: a desire to start again. After several years in Toronto and major shows in New York, Los Angeles, Vancouver, Vienna and Bologna, Isaac moved back home to Saint John, New Brunswick. Borrowing his parents’ Volvo, he drove around looking for things to paint. This nearly worn-out Jack Kerouac notion of “finding yourself,” of embracing the mythologies of the heroic loner, flew in the face of the stringent lessons learned in art school. But the personal, intuitive and idiosyncratic were always elements in his work; now he simply came clean about his own subjective and romantic approach to making art.

One of the most significant results of Isaac’s journey of personal discovery and the resultant pleinair painting out of the back of a Volvo is his increased awareness of the importance of working from observation. Over the past few decades, it has become almost axiomatic that contemporary painting flows through the pictorial framework of the photograph. By making a picture without the scaffolding of the readymade image, by simply recording experience through the visual capacity of imagination and dexterity, Isaac resuscitates an almost radical notion of depiction. I am thinking of that early modernist proposal that drove artists like Manet into the streets, cafés, parks and bedrooms of Paris, a kind of realism that Baudelaire described as a fusion of reportage with the high philosophical imagination of art. Isaac asks whether the simple act of being, of looking, and of translating experience into pictorial form can any longer be the subject of contemporary art. I must confess that, based on the opinions of several painters I spoke to who compared his work to pictures you might find in a garage sale, the jury is still deliberating.

In Jay Isaac’s “The Energy of the Sun,” he is asking simple yet resounding questions: What happens when you remove all the signifiers that declare a work of art as contemporary? What happens when you strip away persona, stylistic novelty, even the notion of progress, and simply record experience in the ancient medium of paint? He works from the extremely confident position that, even when removing all the tropes that coalesce to signal newness, the unadorned process of translation will provide a vehicle for imagination, creativity, even virtuosity. This type of confidence is rare. Few artists are willing to expose the viewer to an encounter with the awkward internal processes of experimentation, learning and failure. Isaac does this while mirroring back all the prejudices, assumptions and outworn notions of what traditional painting is supposed to be: landscapes, flowers, sunsets, oceans. His work brings to mind that of Edvard Munch whose simple, direct observations are teeming with taut psychological concentration, where thoughts, fears and emotions are embedded in the very act of depiction, regardless of the subject. How Munch did this I honestly have no idea, but it is the ingredient that separates good painters from great ones. In his best work Jay Isaac exhibits this quality. ❚

Jay Isaac’s “The Energy of the Sun” was exhibited at Paul Petro Contemporary Art, Toronto, from September 12 to October 11, 2008.

Sky Glabush is an artist and writer who lives in London, Ontario, and teaches at the University of Western Ontario.