Painting the Blues à la Française: A Brief Survey of Jacques Roch
Robert C. Morgan
There are few painters of the last thirty years who have achieved the delicate -- dare I say, "romantic" -- prowess in painting that one may discover in Jacques Roch. Ostensibly, such a determination could be made solely on the basis of Roch’s syntactical ability to structure a painting, but this alone does not account for the signifying power of his remarkable oeuvre. To encounter these paintings is to also engage them, to enjoy them, to feel their lurid graphism and their cryptic erotic nuances through the artist’s tactile color. The richness and fluidity within Roch’s color is so omnipresent that one is tempted to ignore it or to be blinded by its extravagance and delirium. A good reason to mount such a survey is not only to reveal the continuity in these brilliant image-fields but to make clear what is obvious, yet often not discussed. In other words, what are the formal mechanics that give Jacques Roch’s exuberant fiesta of color its subtle leverage, its inspired indulgence towards apocalyptic selfhood?
In a review from the Salon of 1846, Baudelaire analyzes color in painting as being equivalent to a melody in which isolated sounds contribute to the more general overall effect. Through the compilation of these effects, the viewer may incur a deep and lasting impression. Such analytical descriptions, as those inscribed by this impassioned, hashish-driven critic, were regarded as a form of aesthetic inquiry. Here the precise formal aspects of an artist’s work -- such as those present in Delacroix or, on a lesser note, in the incessantly boring portraits of Hippolyte Flandrin or, if worse comes to worse, in the stupid mysticism of Ary Scheffer -- were stated by the critic for an audience deemed to consider whether "the great ideas" instilled within these picture were, in fact, really there.
In reviewing the ten paintings included in Jacques Roch’s survey, I would presume Baudelaire’s analysis of color to have found an unsuspecting match. While color may be felt in terms of music, one cannot deny that the quality of the artist’s drawing is also part of the melody. While both color and line are of equal importance in Roch’s paintings as they were for Matisse, they are organized in very different ways. Roch is not Matisse. This we know. And conversely, we might say that Matisse would never have painted the fanciful, demonic, and absurd subjects of Roch. Yet both reveal an extraordinary poetic insight on the level of pure painting. In regard to these formal traces, Baudelaire was moved to say: "Pure draughtsmanship of colorists is like that of nature; their figures are naturally bounded by a harmonious collision of colored masses." (London: Phaidon, 1965)
I mention Baudelaire because his iterations seem relevant to the way Jacques unravels the problem of formal representation in painting. I see them in works like "The Bridge" (1987-88), a painting that literally changed my way of thinking when I first encountered it in 1990. I also see it in the playful eroticism of works like "The Leg" (2002) or the mysterious "Dream of the Unicorn" (2000). In each case, there is a nearly terrifying aspect to the pictorial assemblage of parts in relation to the whole. The conflict between line and color in these works is both inexorable and turbulent. Roch’s paintings exceed the limits of narrative, moving into the realm of a fresh form of allegory, a type of symbolist painting that updates the project of Redon or even Moreau from a century earlier. In essence, these are visionary paintings, but without the naiveté or the accoutrement that is most often associated with this kind of work. Study these paintings closely and you will see where they are coming from -- the history of the Salon, from Ingres to Delacroix, through the Surrealists and into the future of an antique past.
I am forever amazed that Jacques works consistently in acrylic polymer paints and that he has done so for nearly twenty years. I have never been so easily tricked in my perception of pigment as in the work of Roch. It is uncanny that he can achieve such vividness of hue and value in working with polymer. In earlier paintings, ranging from "The Sound Comes Closer" (1983-84) to the fantastic "Dora" (1993), these paintings are so involved with the tactile sensation of oil paint that one can be easily deceived. The reddish purplish pthalomines and finely-tuned underpainting erupting in "Dora" unleashes a torrent of sensual and formal reconciliations that go beyond previously known boundaries in the manner of paint.
Jacques is also a great lover of Modern French literature. He reads the Symbolist poets and writers faithfully -- Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Gerard de Nerval, and, of course, Baudelaire. He also reads Henri Michaux, but with trepidation, given that Michaux’s depth perception of the psyche is so strongly charged. Genet and Artaud -- who represent the dark side of the human trace in contemporary French literature -- are also favorites. Jacques’s lexicon of images draws from the same well as many of these formidable literary sources.
The art of Jacques Roch is not something that can be reduced to a one-liner. His work and his process of thought are far more complex. As a painter, he understands the mystery (mystique) of color and is not afraid to use it. While timid about denying the relationship of color in his paintings to music, I would have to go further and say that he is very much his own painter. The imaginative fecundity that peers through these surface windows on to another reality is without doubt in paintings such as "Marienbad" (1995) or "Your Majesty, Bon Appétit" (1997). They are paintings saturated in the tragic-comic fusion of the absurd. This is indeed the goal of his formal apparatus. Put another way, the effects that constitute Baudelaire’s melody are perhaps less preconceived in the mind of Roch. Rather they are intuitive and thus exceed the structural parameters of problem-solving or the limits of a stylistic technique that have arrived at a relatively facile solution (which is the virtual definition of academic painting).
Roch is far from the shoreline of these kinds of painterly obsessions. Instead, he wanders in a cerebral forest, looking up toward the light that emits a spectrum of color. Here he envisions a new contour destined to become a figuration or a landscape or a floral arrangement that verges on pathos or the ludicrous or on the conflict of both. In this tradition, Roch furthers exemplifies the French Dadaists of 1920 or the "Incohérents" of La Belle Epoque with the hoarse cry: "Epater la bourgeoisie!" In this sense, we can also say that Jacques paints the blues in an era that is aching to hear them, in a time that is so desperately in search of a more open and personal world, a world with a more enlightened perception of the absurd.
NYC 2005 _________________________________________
Robert C. Morgan is a Fulbright scholar currently residing in GwangJu, Korea. He has organized nearly fifty exhibitions in museums, galleries, and provisional spaces throughout the world. An artist himself, Professor Morgan has authored and edited 14 books on contemporary art and is a Contributing Editor to Sculpture and Team Celeste.
Robert C. Morgan
There are few painters of the last thirty years who have achieved the delicate -- dare I say, "romantic" -- prowess in painting that one may discover in Jacques Roch. Ostensibly, such a determination could be made solely on the basis of Roch’s syntactical ability to structure a painting, but this alone does not account for the signifying power of his remarkable oeuvre. To encounter these paintings is to also engage them, to enjoy them, to feel their lurid graphism and their cryptic erotic nuances through the artist’s tactile color. The richness and fluidity within Roch’s color is so omnipresent that one is tempted to ignore it or to be blinded by its extravagance and delirium. A good reason to mount such a survey is not only to reveal the continuity in these brilliant image-fields but to make clear what is obvious, yet often not discussed. In other words, what are the formal mechanics that give Jacques Roch’s exuberant fiesta of color its subtle leverage, its inspired indulgence towards apocalyptic selfhood?
In a review from the Salon of 1846, Baudelaire analyzes color in painting as being equivalent to a melody in which isolated sounds contribute to the more general overall effect. Through the compilation of these effects, the viewer may incur a deep and lasting impression. Such analytical descriptions, as those inscribed by this impassioned, hashish-driven critic, were regarded as a form of aesthetic inquiry. Here the precise formal aspects of an artist’s work -- such as those present in Delacroix or, on a lesser note, in the incessantly boring portraits of Hippolyte Flandrin or, if worse comes to worse, in the stupid mysticism of Ary Scheffer -- were stated by the critic for an audience deemed to consider whether "the great ideas" instilled within these picture were, in fact, really there.
In reviewing the ten paintings included in Jacques Roch’s survey, I would presume Baudelaire’s analysis of color to have found an unsuspecting match. While color may be felt in terms of music, one cannot deny that the quality of the artist’s drawing is also part of the melody. While both color and line are of equal importance in Roch’s paintings as they were for Matisse, they are organized in very different ways. Roch is not Matisse. This we know. And conversely, we might say that Matisse would never have painted the fanciful, demonic, and absurd subjects of Roch. Yet both reveal an extraordinary poetic insight on the level of pure painting. In regard to these formal traces, Baudelaire was moved to say: "Pure draughtsmanship of colorists is like that of nature; their figures are naturally bounded by a harmonious collision of colored masses." (London: Phaidon, 1965)
I mention Baudelaire because his iterations seem relevant to the way Jacques unravels the problem of formal representation in painting. I see them in works like "The Bridge" (1987-88), a painting that literally changed my way of thinking when I first encountered it in 1990. I also see it in the playful eroticism of works like "The Leg" (2002) or the mysterious "Dream of the Unicorn" (2000). In each case, there is a nearly terrifying aspect to the pictorial assemblage of parts in relation to the whole. The conflict between line and color in these works is both inexorable and turbulent. Roch’s paintings exceed the limits of narrative, moving into the realm of a fresh form of allegory, a type of symbolist painting that updates the project of Redon or even Moreau from a century earlier. In essence, these are visionary paintings, but without the naiveté or the accoutrement that is most often associated with this kind of work. Study these paintings closely and you will see where they are coming from -- the history of the Salon, from Ingres to Delacroix, through the Surrealists and into the future of an antique past.
I am forever amazed that Jacques works consistently in acrylic polymer paints and that he has done so for nearly twenty years. I have never been so easily tricked in my perception of pigment as in the work of Roch. It is uncanny that he can achieve such vividness of hue and value in working with polymer. In earlier paintings, ranging from "The Sound Comes Closer" (1983-84) to the fantastic "Dora" (1993), these paintings are so involved with the tactile sensation of oil paint that one can be easily deceived. The reddish purplish pthalomines and finely-tuned underpainting erupting in "Dora" unleashes a torrent of sensual and formal reconciliations that go beyond previously known boundaries in the manner of paint.
Jacques is also a great lover of Modern French literature. He reads the Symbolist poets and writers faithfully -- Mallarmé, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Gerard de Nerval, and, of course, Baudelaire. He also reads Henri Michaux, but with trepidation, given that Michaux’s depth perception of the psyche is so strongly charged. Genet and Artaud -- who represent the dark side of the human trace in contemporary French literature -- are also favorites. Jacques’s lexicon of images draws from the same well as many of these formidable literary sources.
The art of Jacques Roch is not something that can be reduced to a one-liner. His work and his process of thought are far more complex. As a painter, he understands the mystery (mystique) of color and is not afraid to use it. While timid about denying the relationship of color in his paintings to music, I would have to go further and say that he is very much his own painter. The imaginative fecundity that peers through these surface windows on to another reality is without doubt in paintings such as "Marienbad" (1995) or "Your Majesty, Bon Appétit" (1997). They are paintings saturated in the tragic-comic fusion of the absurd. This is indeed the goal of his formal apparatus. Put another way, the effects that constitute Baudelaire’s melody are perhaps less preconceived in the mind of Roch. Rather they are intuitive and thus exceed the structural parameters of problem-solving or the limits of a stylistic technique that have arrived at a relatively facile solution (which is the virtual definition of academic painting).
Roch is far from the shoreline of these kinds of painterly obsessions. Instead, he wanders in a cerebral forest, looking up toward the light that emits a spectrum of color. Here he envisions a new contour destined to become a figuration or a landscape or a floral arrangement that verges on pathos or the ludicrous or on the conflict of both. In this tradition, Roch furthers exemplifies the French Dadaists of 1920 or the "Incohérents" of La Belle Epoque with the hoarse cry: "Epater la bourgeoisie!" In this sense, we can also say that Jacques paints the blues in an era that is aching to hear them, in a time that is so desperately in search of a more open and personal world, a world with a more enlightened perception of the absurd.
NYC 2005 _________________________________________
Robert C. Morgan is a Fulbright scholar currently residing in GwangJu, Korea. He has organized nearly fifty exhibitions in museums, galleries, and provisional spaces throughout the world. An artist himself, Professor Morgan has authored and edited 14 books on contemporary art and is a Contributing Editor to Sculpture and Team Celeste.