Robert Jacks
Red 2005

Robert Jacks has developed a multi-disciplinary art practice spanning five decades. From his expanded box constructions, cut paper and felt works of the 1960s and ‘70s to his sculptural assemblages, paintings and prints, he has employed minimal and conceptual strategies for making art. The grid forms a recurrent motif in Jacks’ two and three dimensional practice alongside other geometric forms. Suggesting order and systems while expressing the contradictory forces of contraction and expansion, it is figured here in his most recent oil paintings on linen.

In these works varying shades of red are juxtaposed. Blocks of colour move in and out of one another, creating a three-dimensional lattice effect with darker areas of colouration suggesting shadows. Building on his early monochromes such as Red painting 1967, first shown in the ground-breaking NGV exhibition The Field (1968), they are optically vibrant and suggestive of a bold new direction.

- Rachel Kent 2005

Rachel Kent is Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney