Patel brown Gallery | 21 Wade Ave

Luis Jacob | Borderline Cases: Two in the Bush

March 26 - May 7 2022

As a resident of Toronto, I see the world crosseyed. Where there is a single figure, I see it paired, split in two. [1]

Luis Jacob conceives of a borderline case as the appearance of a cross eyed intelligence that renders the world into a living and breathing double exposure. In this state, Jacob perceives the qualities of place that are often thought to be opposites as overlapping lenses. Here subjectivity then becomes a wandering line between representation and abstraction, presence and absence, stasis and praxis. When Jacob looks at the borderline case of his beloved Toronto he sees one virtuous and one vicious, [2] two dueling forces that play out between the major bodies of work on view in the exhibition space. For Jacob, Toronto is built atop two prevalent metaphors: the tangled garden and the vacant lot. [3]

Presented as a suite of 26 pen and ink double-pendulum drawings (installed in two grids), Jacob’s The Tangled Garden (I - XXVI) (2020) reveals the beautiful chaos of urban life. From afar these abstractions appear as blooming bouquets of flowers or dense tree canopies found while wandering through twisting and turning ravines. A carpet world! [4] However, as the viewer moves closer, the subtlety of each line comes into focus. What was once a fuzzy abstraction is revealed as an intricate crisscrossing composition of lines. Jacob guides his pendulum apparatus as if intuitively perceiving the errant paths of people on foot walking, skipping, and dashing across the city. 

In contrast to the tangled garden, the vacant lot represents Toronto’s inclination towards erasure. As an extension of a colonial mindset, the vacant lot renders land empty unless useful  (or profitable) for one's own purposes. [5] The contrast between the fervent energy of the tangled garden and the austere spareness of the vacant lot is no more clear than in Jacob’s On a Vacant Lot IV (2020) mounted on checkered wallpaper; referencing the transparent background in Adobe Photoshop. Here the sweeping pendulous lines of colour guide the eye into a swirling vortex towards its painted centre. As if transported, we delight in the fractal world of intersecting form and colour. However, just beyond the unframed canvas lies the rigid lines of the “transparent” grid. The alternating white and grey blocks confuse the eye with a vibrating moiré pattern that embodies the paradox that these two realms coexist at once.

Installed in a three-by-three grid, Jacob’s In the Studio (2021) reminds us again that absence is not a void. Created while moving out of his studio due to rising rents, Jacob captures traces of his footsteps back and forth during this act of displacement. The ghost image of Jacob’s presence is delicately fixed to the surface of each sheet. The subtlety of each composition reminds the viewer to reckon with the conditions that lead to such omissions.

Much like the cross eyed vision of the borderline case, the collection of works on view speak across time. With one eye in the past and one veering towards the future, this exhibition intersperses new works with early monochrome paintings, preparatory sketches, and drawings from Jacob’s oeuvre to show the overarching logic of a practice situated within a double-take world. This exhibition plots a course between a forever changing constellation of conditions. The result is an end that never truly arrives. Indeed, before this line/life can approach a possible end it instinctively loops back on itself, constantly iterating away from resolution. — Parker Kay

This exhibition also runs alongside the exhibition Borderline Cases: One in the Hand at Pumice Raft from March 20—April 24, 2022.

Endnotes:
[1] Jacob, Luis. “Blast to Counterblast: Three Borderline Cases.” Unpublished, p.2.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Luis Jacob first explored the concepts of the Tangled Garden and the Vacant Lot in the curated exhibition Form Follows Fiction: Art and Artists in Toronto at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto in 2016.
[4] In the work On a Vacant Lot (Harold Town), (2020) [on view at Pumice Raft] Jacob pairs this quote by Harold Town alongside a double pendulum drawing:
“Nearly every day on my way home from the studio, I climb a two-hundred-and-forty-five foot hill at the back of the house. By leaning forward to get [a] better purchase of the earth, I came to see the grounds that I had been growing away from since birth. The insects, humus, debris, fossils and imperceptible thrusting of a carpet world were real again.”
[5] Jacob, Luis. "Pegi Nicol MacLeod,” Canadian Women Artists History Initiative Conference, online. October 1, 2021. Beginning at 34:57. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dM8lHDTEznE.