THE CLUB is pleased to present Unbearable Lightness, a solo exhibition of Jackie Saccoccio. This exhibition marks Jackie's first presentation in Asia and features eleven new paintings and two prints.

In new oil paintings in this exhibition, the allusion to the sublime is overt. By way of demandingly physical techniques, Saccoccio builds veils and layers to produce the skin of the painting. She drags and bounces massive, dripping stretchers over neighboring canvasses, using the stretched canvas as both drawing tool and paint recipient. The resulting calligraphic chance webbings are analogous to nature’s surfaces and the psychological and physical uncertainty that one encounters in nature. The subsequent overlay of a clumsy muscular pixilation counters the fluid aspect of gesture, creating a tension between nature and body, painting and viewer.

The works can be categorized into two groups based on their shared canvas tools. The first includes Place (Blue Speed) and Place (Sweep), where light webbings emerge from the dark ground, carving away from the canvas, away from a vertiginous pull, akin to the transient rolling color transformations of an impending storm cloud, finding incidences of light to hold onto.

In the second group, which is comprised of Place (Red Cherries), the poured webs are flooded with atomized color in the form of painted swatches to intercept the broad gestural underpinnings. The hand-painted blotches of color are flawed in their density, but effective in counter balancing the pours and stains in the paintings, adding to the works’ anthropomorphic physicality. Here the above-mentioned tension between body and nature veers more towards body/viewer.

References abound throughout the paintings and prints, from J.M.W. Turner’s distressed ship metaphor, Jean Dubuffet’s raw manipulation of surface, performative paintings of Gutai group including Kazuo Shiraga, and Helen Frankenthaler’s sublime pours. In all there is a disciplined adherence to beauty as a carrier of meaning.

Jackie Saccoccio (b. 1963) is a NY-based artist. She was educated at School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA) and Rhode Island School of Design (BFA). Saccoccio is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including The Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome; Guggenheim Grant; Fulbright Grant; and a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship. She has exhibited nationally and abroad for the last 20 years. Solo exhibitions include Museo d’ Arte Contemporanea di Villa Croce, Genoa, Italy; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS. Group exhibitions include Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; MOCA Jacksonville, Addison Museum of American Art, MA; RISD Museum of Art, Providence; and The Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA. Her works have been in museum collections such as Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Dallas Museum of Art; Dallas, TX, Saatchi Gallery, London, UK.