Jackie Saccoccio: Femme Brut

J A C K I E

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S A C C O C C I O 1

JACKIE SACCOCCIO FEMME BRUT ESSAY BY JULIA WOLKOFF FIORE

Into the Void: Chaos and Order in Jackie Saccoccio’s Femme Brut The ferocity of the more than thirty paintings, drawings, and prints in Jackie Saccoccio’s “Femme Brut” is revealed slowly; the works reach for transcendence even as they proclaim their objecthood. They impart the artist’s strong, corporeal touch, her forceful energy for slinging paint. There’s an unambiguous work ethic to abstraction, a manual labor that’s impossible to hide from view. For Saccoccio, painting has become more than an expression of that labor. Her canvases are the very tools that enable it.

de la Loue (2019). The dark and mysterious cave, shadowed by hanging arbors of melting, popsiclecolored paint, blows through the composition, which takes its title and inspiration from a series of Courbet landscapes. “I know Courbet’s paintings are beautiful,” Saccoccio explained, “but when I look at them, I feel lawless, a guttural understanding of materials—the body, stone.” Like Courbet’s, this new La Source lacks an apparent horizon line or middle ground, offering a frightening, but protected, open space in its stead.

In this way, Saccoccio’s sensibility seems to refer neatly to the red-blooded Abstract Expressionists, their drips and splatters an immediate signifier of this tradition.

But to stop at this moment in history when referring to Saccoccio is to deny fluidity; it means containing a movement that strove to open doors instead of close them. Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Helen Frankenthaler, as Saccoccio told me, had a deep understanding of their forebears. These artists violently ripped history apart, breaking painting down to its molecules. But without specific reference, Pollock connected to early American landscape; Frankenthaler looked to Diego Velázquez’s treatment of light.

Such cosmic abysses recur in Saccoccio’s works. They are “vertiginous, eccentric things,” she described— allusions to “deep space.” La Source de la Loue is bigger than she is, its scale only reinforcing its expansive cave imagery and, beyond the strictures of AbEx, pointing to a longer history of landscape painting as emotional metaphor. The titles of many of her works include words like “convex,” “concave,” and “vacuum,” suggesting equally suffocating but open-ended spaces. Courbet’s originals are violent and beautiful, tangible and poetic, with brutal mark-making courtesy of his palette knife.

But the immense geological presence of his rocky river streams center around a metaphysical absence. The cave is a suggestion of lurking potential, the opposite of the typical metaphor attributed to paintings; not a window but a void.

Saccoccio is no different; her fluency in art history has led her to riff on the AbEx tradition, rather than extend or work within it. Gustave Courbet serves as a potent reference for several works in “Femme Brut.”

Incongruous feelings emerge from a rusted bronze expanse, which reaches its deepest point toward the upper-middle-left side of one hulking canvas, La Source

Even so, a kind of internal window does appear, on the very surface of canvases like Prospero (2019). Quick, pixelated brush marks spray from a depth of blue-black towards the center of the work. These invocations of cityscape, or rows of apartment windows, reiterate the architectural element of the paintings while refusing an additional entry point into the composition. Saccoccio

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has created here a difficult and winding path into a disorderly, baroque façade. On the other side, she suggests, is enlightenment.

well-matched partners. The resulting webs of paint, proof of a strenuous but instinctual process, seem at once distant from the body and inseparable from it.

The tempestuous layers in all of her works operate by chance and intentional, human specificity—paint pours and drips and washes, transmitted from one canvas onto another, meet brush marks scratched across the surfaces. This dichotomy is mirrored in another one of Saccoccio’s main sources of inspiration, Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a drama rife with stormy weather and wayward sorcery. Several works bear titles in reference to the main characters—Prospero, Caliban, Miranda—but their strongest likeness to the Elizabethan tragic comedy is their contrast of the anti-masque (the tempest) and masque proper (the betrothal of Miranda and Ferdinand). In other words, chaos and vice are overtaken, or at least tempered, by civilization and order. Saccoccio creates tumult on her canvases, then lets the physical force of her artistry overcome it.

At the same time, the technique prompted Saccoccio to dramatically reduce her scale for some works, inspiring a return to printmaking. Her largest creations evolve intuitively over weeks or months while the intimate prints suggest still moments in between paintings: the flash of a memory of a gesture. Black-and-white etchings like Untitled (2018) have a finite logic, the plate pressed to paper in a single, decisive moment. Yet the elliptical ink spills she tactfully included in the plate broach the walls of their conscribed center, reaching the edges of the paper in a clash between chance and foresight. Even as their contents strive to define something immaterial and impermanent, the shifting proportions of the fourteen paintings, four prints, and fourteen drawings on view together tether the mind to the body—both for viewers and its maker—in an overwhelming conveyance of gestural color.

The artist tangoes with her monumental paintings, employing one as an instrument for another to drip and pour and dab in a self-referential chain of markmaking. Her subversion of the monotype technique— using one canvas as a plate for another—reinforces the painting as a tool, a thing with multiple purposes: useful, visual, and spiritual. Layered, calligraphic prints are borne from pools of paint, manipulated and spilled across the floor, dragged and prodded, conveyed from one canvas to the next. Saccoccio pushes her physical limits to compose these works, changing from heavy wood to lighter aluminum stretchers to make this dance possible, an even exchange between

Abstraction remains vital because it best embodies the disorder and chaos of our time. With these new works, Saccoccio serves up a reminder of the power of intention while still acknowledging the mysterious, open vacuum at the center of it all. Here, she has cast herself as a femme brut, or “raw woman.” It’s a reference to Jean Dubuffet and Art Brut—to the antiacademic, emotional, and improvisational. But she has also flexed the strength of her muscles, forcing together the contradictory elements of our world.

By Julia Wolkoff Fiore 3

La Source de la Loue, 2019, oil, oil pastel, and mica on linen, 114 x 94 inches (289.6 x 238.8 cm) 4

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Tonal Eclipse, 2019, oil and mica on linen, 79 x 65 inches (200.7 x 165.1 cm) 7

Source (Vacuum), 2019, oil and mica on linen, 79 x 65 inches (200.7 x 165.1 cm) 8

Cosmic Cave, 2019, oil and mica on linen, 79 x 65 inches (200.7 x 165.1 cm) 9

Prospero, 2019, oil on linen, 79 x 65 inches (200.7 x 165.1 cm) 11

Le Puits Noir (Concave), 2019, oil and mica on linen, 79 x 65 inches (200.7 x 165.1 cm) 12

Miranda, 2019, oil and mica on linen, 79 x 65 inches (200.7 x 165.1 cm) 13

Source (Convex), 2019, oil, oil pastel, and mica on linen, 79 x 65 inches (200.7 x 165.1 cm) 14

Source (Concave), 2019, oil and mica on linen, 79 x 65 inches (200.7 x 165.1 cm) 15

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Tempest (Concave), 2019, oil and oil pastel on linen, 130 x 94 inches (330.2 x 238.8 cm) 18

Tempest (Convex), 2019, oil on linen, 130 x 94 inches (330.2 x 238.8 cm) 19

Caliban, 2019, oil and oil pastel on linen, 106 x 79 inches (269.2 x 200.7 cm) 21

Le Puits Noir (Convex), 2019, oil, oil pastel, and mica on linen, 79 x 65 inches (200.7 x 165.1 cm) 22

Ariel (The Smooth), 2019, oil and mica on linen, 106 x 79 inches (269.2 x 200.7 cm) 23

Joan (Concave), 2019, oil, oil pastel and mica on linen, 106 x 79 inches (269.2 x 200.7 cm) 24

Joan (Convex), 2019, oil on linen, 106 x 79 inches (269.2 x 200.7 cm) 25

Untitled, 2019, oil pastel on paper, 12 x 9 inches (30.5 x 22.9 cm) 27

Untitled, 2019, oil pastel on paper, 11 3/4 x 8 1/4 inches (29.8 x 21 cm) Untitled, 2019, oil pastel on paper, 11 3/4 x 8 1/4 inches (29.8 x 21 cm) 28

Untitled, 2019, oil pastel on paper, 11 3/4 x 8 1/4 inches (29.8 x 21 cm) Untitled, 2019, oil pastel on paper, 11 3/4 x 8 1/4 inches (29.8 x 21 cm) 29

Untitled, 2019, oil pastel on paper, 12 x 12 inches (30.5 x 30.5 cm) Untitled, 2019, oil pastel on paper, 12 x 12 inches (30.5 x 30.5 cm) 30

Untitled, 2019, oil pastel on paper, 12 x 12 inches (30.5 x 30.5 cm) Untitled, 2019, oil pastel on paper, 12 x 12 inches (30.5 x 30.5 cm) 31

JACKIE SACCOCCIO was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1963 and today lives and works in Connecticut and New York City. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting at Rhode Island School of Design in 1985 and her Master of Fine Arts in Painting at School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1988. Saccoccio is the recipient of prestigious awards and grants, including The Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome; a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship; a Fulbright grant; an Art Production Fund/ Monet Foundation Giverny residency; an Artadia NADA Award; and a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship. Her work is in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, Providence, RI; The Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; MOCA Jacksonville, FL; The Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; and The Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA. She has exhibited nationally and abroad for the last two decades. Her solo exhibitions include Museo d’ Arte Contemporanea di Villa Croce, Genoa; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; The Club, Tokyo, Japan; a two-venue show at 11R, NY and Van Doren Waxter, NY; Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, IL; Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago, IL; and Brand New Gallery, Milan. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Artforum, The New Yorker, and New York Magazine.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Jackie Saccoccio: Femme Brut January 22 - March 14, 2020 Essay by Julia Wolkoff Fiore Van Doren Waxter 23 East 73 St New York, NY 10021 CHART 74 Franklin St New York, NY 10013 All artwork © Jackie Saccoccio Photography: Charles Benton ISBN: 978-1-7325933-2-9 Designed by Mélanie Davroux / Printed by GHP Media

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