Gregory Jacobsen: Potatoland
The centerpiece of Gregory Jacobsen’s show of 37 panel paintings at Zg is Teratoma Tower, which recalls Hieronymus Bosch: among its grotesque small creatures in a surreal landscape are a peanut-shaped blob with an erection and a tiny figure pulling a man’s intestines out through a slit in his stomach. But where Bosch’s paintings are suffused with the hard-edged certitude of early Renaissance art, Jacobsen’s are unabashedly sensual, subjective, and even celebratory: the painter obviously likes this stuff.
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Last year Jacobsen showed somewhat similar paintings at Zg, but these are better: the colors are lighter, gentler, and more transparent, giving his forms a feeling of contingency. As before, he’s not fixated on any particular weirdness. Witness the variety of horrors in Teratoma Tower–a woman hauls a severed male head in a cart while an androgynous figure has a knife in its anus and its arms chopped off. A teratoma is a tumor that includes several types of tissue–such as hair, fat, muscle–and the many figures in Teratoma Tower are grouped around an accretion of undefined fleshy forms: a three-toed foot, an ejaculating penis. It’s all capped by a giant chocolate doughnut, emphasizing Jacobsen’s twin themes of food and flesh. Answering Bosch’s sacred vision of hell with a humorous assemblage that includes mass-culture and machine-age objects, he doesn’t so much comment on our society as expand his range of grotesqueries.
In addition to obscuring the line between male and female, Jacobsen blurs the distinctions between humans, animals, and plants, in keeping with a tradition that runs throughout much “primitive” art. In Fancy Meats Curled Upward a duck with bulbous legs and feathers on its arms wears girlie shoes and socks, and there’s a strong suggestion of female genitalia in the crease in its panties and protruding pubic hair. The rich blue of the sky behind it is reflected in the light blue of the feathers, creating a chromatic continuity that obscures the distinction between figure and ground, creature and landscape.
Earl’s other three sculptures also undercut the supposed superiority of human beings. In Love at First Sight, a dog on a pedestal shaped and colored like jeans faces a figure whose bottom half is a girl in a skirt while its top resembles a large bone. Earl festoons the base of this sculpture with cans, bricks, and other detritus colored in a gentle light pink. Edifice in Process is a large tower crisscrossed by boards and filled with junk, including a paint can, as well as several resting workmen; it’s crowned by a classical column perched at a precarious angle. But what’s most interesting here is Earl’s use of negative space: like his suggestive, soft colors, the sculpture’s gaps undercut its form and add mystery.
