Luis Jacob, Pictures at an Exhibition

[En anglais]

What constitutes picture making at its sparest, most pared-down state? It is just this question that drives the latest instalment of Toronto artist Luis Jacob’s multi-city, mid-career survey, Pictures at an Exhibition. In a solo exhibition that assembles three distinct series of works from the past two decades, Jacob demonstrates his knack for intuitively bringing together visual material in a way that questions just what it is we do when we look at art.

This emphasis on the gaze is made immediately apparent in the work that greets the viewer at the gallery entrance. Eclipse (2009), an artist’s multiple, presents a small glass eye carefully laid out in a velvet-lined wood case. Though it’s a simple gesture, it powerfully calls up a whole history of art that reflects on the powers of vision (Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s 1929 surrealist film, Un Chien Andalou, immediately comes to mind, with its squirm-inducing scene of a razor slicing into a woman’s eye), while also hinting at a theme that reverberates throughout Jacob’s other work: that, when we look at art, the work sometimes looks back.