Paul Jacobsen "Paintings & Drawings"

Tanja Grunert Gallery

poster for Paul Jacobsen "Paintings & Drawings"

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Klemens Gasser and Tanja Grunert present an exhibition of paintings by Paul Jacobsen. This is the first exhibition at Gasser Grunert Gallery’s new 19th Street location.

Jacobsen paints his interpretations of our civilization’s demise as a pastoral, post agricultural, future primitive fantasyland, post-industrial collapse. His paintings and imagery hang in the balance of hypocrisy and honesty, using the language and cues of pornography, Photoshop and a highly fabricated vision of a faultless society.

Slickly painted in a lush, candy colored palate, overly sexed nudes exist in an “Eden-esque” romantic landscape. The naked women interact innocuously with woodland creatures; two black bears wrestle and a doe is comfortably bedded down behind a lusty soft core nude, idly indulging in fruit. Tasteful centerfolds lounge in flowered fields with eco-cottages, horses and yurts in the distance. In Jacobsen’s utopia, social cues have vanquished; leisure time and renewed sensuality abound as well as a reinstated reverence with the natural world. Jacobsen questions our societal norms and investigates what would happen if pre-established codes were eliminated. There is a sense of sweetness here, confounded close behind with discomfort, as vestiges of our abolished society mar the landscape. Familiar refuse piles of cars, planes, metal scraps and consumer detritus exist as monumental remnants of the end of our mediated experience.

Within his work, Jacobsen presents complicated satirical layers of interpretation, as he masterfully exists in the paradox of condemning and exploiting consumer and commercial images. He uses the visual cues of photo retouching, or the loaded vernacular of pornography, all the while implementing them as the formal and contextual language of the painting itself. As readings of the paintings become ambiguous and conflict with one another, the utopian images he depicts become fractured and flawed, reflecting the futile and vain climb out of our corrupt social grid. Jacobsen reinforces the cultural ideals that cause him to recoil by using their vernacular in ironic content and form. In doing so, he reclaims and takes ownership of his paintings, which are by nature, subject to luxury culture and lifestyle. Jacobsen said, “my paintings encourage a future with no place for them.”
Jacobsen’s paintings acknowledge the seemingly immutable societal cues and rigid standards present in our culture; he paints a utopian dystopia through the lens of our current social and consumer driven forward march to self-destruction.
Paul Jacobsen (born 1976, Denver, Colorado) attended Lorenzo De Medici Institutto D’Arte, Florence, Italy 1997-98) He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Media

Schedule

from March 04, 2010 to April 03, 2010

Opening Reception on 2010-03-04 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

Paul Jacobsen

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