Jackie Saccoccio: Portraits: 2nd Floor Gallery

Van Doren Waxter is pleased to exhibit Portraits, a show of works by the late American painter, Jackie Saccoccio. Showcasing five paintings, including two monumental works titled “Portraits,” as well as four works on paper, Portraits presents Saccoccio’s mature works.

Saccoccio’s fluid and immersive abstract paintings reach their final state through unpredictable situations imposed by the artist– paintings get dragged across one another or pressed against each other while the paint is wet and tacky. Saccoccio responds to the serendipitous dribbles and drag marks, weaving the entire image into what feels like a cosmic scenery. Abundant with manual labor, her improvisational structure works in favor of an artist who was not afraid to control the material as much as to be confounded by it. 

Though one could intuit that these paintings mirror internal worlds, the distinctly figurative title, Portrait, came after a revelatory trip to Rome. Having long been inspired by Roman Baroque paintings and architecture, when faced with a larger-than-life statue of Pope Innocent X made in the 1640s by Alessandro Algardi at the Capitoline Museum, Saccoccio was astounded by the immersive force of the monument. Within its immense scale, the sculpture contained multitudes of intricate details that captured light and shadow. Saccoccio’s mark-making reflects the desire for such multiplicity– rattling the deep pools of chemical and electric color underneath. The subject of Algardi’s sculpture is a distant reference, similar to Saccoccio’s amorphous field of color. Without explicit historical attributions, but through their sheer scale and depth, Saccoccio’s paintings push the viewers to look inwards to themselves, returning to the figure, the person, from abstraction.