Frie J. Jacobs (Belgium)

"Prelude"

27 April 2007 – 9 June 2007

  Frie J. Jacobs makes photographs with an embodied gaze that has become corporeal through the eye. Instead of letting his mind go out throughthe eyes to wander around the objects, he allows the objects to pass into him. It is the intensity of alterity, of the object’s physicality and of itsaffect, which like a ripple through the ether reaches the artist’s body that is itself part of the flesh of the world. This intensive force legitimises the artist’s existence. It is not the artist who gives birth to objects or things, but things that give birth to artists. Raw impressions of objects are first captured and held hostage; and then, like important memories, they are preserved as images. Prelude consists of nine unique photographs, which are images the artist has decided to preserve. They are the result of an investigation into one of the five themes of his project Fatum. 

Jacobs’ work emphasizes –and is rooted in– the physical world, but never tries to imitate reality. His subject-matter is nature and these pictures are portraits of plants. Although they are photographs, they posses the quality and texture of paintings; paintings painted with the gaze and with light. Sensitive to light’s double function of showing and hiding, the objects are shrouded by a blur. Suggestively, they almost pierce the skin of this cocoon-like veil that covers them. They are revealed to the viewer in their unconcealedness. Pre-consciously and pre-reflectively they deal us an ontological blow that is all the stronger because they constitute the stuff of which we are made. Looking at something means keeping it at a distance; it is our body, our vision, which holds things in a circle around us. Addressing the viewer as an organic being, these works bridge this gap, a gap that has estranged us from the natural world. It is in this way, before these works, that we can begin to make sense of the dictum to see is to feel.  

                                  David Ulrichs (Berlin, april  2007)