Luis Jacob

A wall-sized photograph of a young Luis Jacob—stretching his right eye open with his index fingers—greets visitors at the entrance to “Pictures at an Exhibition,” the second chapter of a mid-career survey show at MOCCA marking his homecoming to Toronto. This mildly grotesque gesture reads as performative and sets the stage for an exhibition in which the act of looking and art-as-theatre are central themes. Immediately the image is repeated as visitors approach a plinth supporting Jacob’s Eclipse, 2009, a small wooden box containing an ocular prosthesis, a glass eye.

Occupying the centre of three walls in the main gallery is a strong triangular formation of nocturnal tie-dye creatures looming over the room, their eyes above our heads. This formation is They Sleep with One Eye Open. With their aesthetic of airbrushed t-shirts and posters, these expansive, outrageous canvases have shock value. Huge starburst eyes appear out of rapturous colour-filled backgrounds, and pictorial representation emerges where abstraction should be; these are, in fact, derived from Mark Rothko paintings from the Panza collection. Airbrushed in 2008, the works represent Jacob’s recent production and are flanked by much earlier work dating back to 1990.

With nearly two decades separating works in the exhibition, curator David Liss has united past with present. Hung on either side of the enormous creatures are small, hard-edge, oil-on-canvas abstract paintings from the ’90s. Their subtle, hand-made nuances and largely monochromatic surfaces contrast with the seamless feathering of the airbrushed canvases. Two stacked horizontal fields of colour comprise Jacob’s Little Eye, 1993, which bears resemblance to Rothko’s late “Black on Grey” paintings but occupies a mere two-by-three inch rectangle. Compared to the large scale of They Sleep with One Eye Open, the hard-edge works look tiny and inconsequential, calling perhaps for a different, quiet, kind of attention.

Opposite the entry, a low-ceilinged enclosure houses Album X, 2010, Jacob’s newest collage series. Resembling a subway platform and brightly lit by a row of bulbs on the ceiling, the enclosure is a tableau for those who are looking in. Viewers standing on the platform are witting and unwitting actors. Album X consists of images cut from art books and magazines collaged and laminated in small groupings to create narratives through their formal associations. Disembodied from their dates and titles, these art-historical images become confused with real life and blur the line between theatre and reality. Taken as a whole, the album is a visual mash-up reminiscent of Gerhard Richter’s Atlas. The recurring motif is people gathered to look at art. There’s a James Turrell, a Katharina Grosse, a Théodore Géricault, a Jeff Wall, a Barnett Newman. Other images are harder to locate. Several cut-outs depict people looking at monochrome paintings, mirroring the present moment in the gallery.

Jacob is a master of crisscrossing sightlines in a gallery; here, viewers are watched by the tie-dye creatures while looking at works and while watching or participating in the tableau. Similar lines of sight were drawn at the first installment of Jacob’s survey exhibition in June 2010, inside the cavernous hall of the Darling Foundry in Montreal, in which he constructed a white cube with one glass wall to house 12 subtle monochrome and duochrome paintings. Viewers inside the white cube were actors in a different art exercise. This has to be one of Jacob’s most convincing running projects: not to make art alone, but to rebuild the stage where art is played out.

The adjoining project space contains works chosen by Jacob from the National Gallery of Canada collection as part of the new ngc at mocca program. Referencing the wunderkammer of the Renaissance, “Cabinet” is a three-dimensional version of Jacob’s Album X collages. The play between reality and theatre continues as a fluorescent light by Dan Flavin is juxtaposed with Sunlight on Table and Floor, a convincing illusion by Murray Favro. Ron Mueck’s Maquette for the Head of “A Girl,” 2006, mingles with Sam Blake, a death mask from 1914 by Walter S Allward. Drawing together objects not normally co-exhibited, Jacob suspends categorical boundaries. A revival of the encyclopedic nature of the museum, “Cabinet” works against the white-cube-gallery aesthetic, opening infinite possibilities.

At the opening for “Pictures at an Exhibition,” deep winter was triumphed over as a shoulder-to-shoulder crowd filled MOCCA. Not just the early hard-edge paintings, or odd sketches from the ’90s strewn throughout the show, but also the crowd itself—all ages, and engaged—were proof of Jacob’s roots in the Toronto art scene, a scene of free-schools, big dreams and shows in abandoned buildings. So, until the end of March, as day dawned over Toronto, a gentle rebelliousness filled the gallery at MOCCA, and Jacob’s nocturnal creatures slept on their perch upon the wall. ❚

“Luis Jacob: Pictures at an Exhibition,” curated by David Liss, was exhibited at mocca in Toronto from February 4 to March 27, 2011.

Anna Kovler is a writer and artist living in Guelph, Ontario.