JACDO Walks Through the Door at Lichtundfire

JACDO, Breaking Free, 2024, Acrylic & mixed media on canvas, 70 x 77 in., Lichtundfire, 2024

JACDO
The Day I Walked Through The Door
Lichtundfire
MAY 30 to JUNE 22, 2024
Curated by Elga Wimmer

By MARK BLOCH June 2024

Lichtundfire and curator Elga Wimmer presented The Day I Walked Through The Door, a solo exhibition by the self-taught artist JACDO, also known as Jacques Dominique Joachim, who was born in 1965.

JACDO lives and works in Le Mans, France now, but he hails from the Caribbean island of Martinique. This is his first show in New York, a series of paintings reflecting an “ongoing search for identity.” He is a mix of immigrant nationalities including African-Creole, European, Arab, Indian and Chinese. This exhibition combines his fine art chops with a background in fashion design and graphic design.

JACDO, Installation View, The Day I Walked Through the Door, Curated by Elga Wimmer, Lichtundfire, 2024

I was surprised because what one might expect a designer from Martinique to create was a show with a commercial, maybe conventional Caribbean vibe: all French islands, palm trees, waterfalls and turquoise lagoons; maybe some West Indies colors; at best something reminiscent of Gaugin’s Tahiti or the imaginary jungles of Henri Rousseau.

Instead, while indeed colorful and striking, this show of seven museum-sized paintings went down not tourist-y or overly engineered but easy and spontaneous with a smooth, cosmopolitan, very Modern delivery—and a delayed, edgy, punctuated Postmodern punch in the detail.

Yes, there is some turquoise but the colors here speak more of Kandinsky or even Miro’s vibrant European modernism with Cubist vertical forms and tribal crescent-shaped mask faces carved metaphorically from the cylindrical shapes of trees. Close up they resemble Picasso and Braque, from farther away, The Fauves or Surrealists. But this French artist’s African echoes emanate directly from his homeland in the Caribean, not one step removed.

JACDO, Breaking Free (detail), 2024, Acrylic & mixed media on canvas, 70 x 77 in., Lichtundfire, 2024

The Postmodern touch that is dispatched with a level of detachment belongs to attention-getting enlargements of antique slavery-related text. Not just anonymously clipped from newspapers as the Cubists did, these are digitally reproduced copies of very specific content, enlarged and spread aggressively across the large unstretched canvases but then swallowed a bit by the oranges, purples, blues and yellows for a delayed reaction. The text comes from publications like “The Liberator” as one says, presumably representing others. One text was “Anti-Slavery” but most were not. In matter-of-fact late 19th-early 20th century typefaces they propose, suggest and recommend: “Slaves,” “Negroes,” sales at “City Hall,” a “$200 reward” and “$300 reward”. They advertise young “bucks” and “wenches” to be sold or publicize runaways to be caught and returned. In two places is the same illustration of a man carrying a knapsack on his shoulder, in one labeled “Jim,” a hunted, advertised escapee. These recontextualized cultural mirrors now speak defiantly with power to power but the archaic language they carry gives the unmistakable message the ambiguous and detached feel of a “masterful” subtext, not a virtuous scolding.

Also attractive are the uniform sizes of the seven finished images—all strikingly large, made for institutions, designed by a designer for large walls in large rooms. Constructed like precious little early Cubist works would be, containing tiny bits of newspaper, these are instead grand, confident, pointed and yet fresh, surprising pastiche-like reenactments of a bygone era—both in subject matter and stylistically. Archival and anachronistic while relevant.

Each piece boasts different a different background feel—grays and browns vs. blues, oranges and yellows. One only blue; one more, though painted, has a raw canvas feel to it. A yellow background here, a white there. Finally a simple one—half black and half white—excels.

JACDO, Follow the Longitude and Latitude, 2024Acrylic & mixed media on canvas, 70 x 77 in, Lichtundfire, 2024

Most then feature images of rectangular perimeters built from what looks like canvas stretcher bars, some adorned with arrows, others are arrows—yellow, purple, a brown stair-like shape or a red 90° vector form, bent like an elbow. Only one is more triangular than rectangle but it’s surrounding a head. All but one engulfs a disembodied head with white impasto teeth. All but one of the heads are right side up and all but one of those has red eyeballs with crazed “whites of the eyes” peering out in blue instead.

Whimsical but geometric Basquiat-like imagery abounds, a compliment because so many of his imitators fail in attempts to mimic, while these are neither failures or imitations. “The gritty feel of his paintings evokes the energy of Basquiat, but also Dubuffet and the French artist JR, who like JACDO is pre-occupied with the dichotomy of a longing for both commitment and freedom,” according to Elga Wimmer, the curator of this suite of self-portraits in motion.

Indeed Art Brut and African sculpture come to mind, as the artist invokes “African masks in the spirit of Cuban artist Wilfredo Lam” also according to Wimmer. Apparently JACDO found optimism and hope during travels in Latin America, North America, and Europe after venturing out from his native melting pot of the Caribbean, France and Africa cultures of French Martinique.

JACDO, Immigrants or Witnesses..? 2024, Acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 70 x 77 in., Lichtundfire, 2024

In painted language, JACDO supplements imagery with phrases like “broken families,” “lost identities,” “split into pieces,” and “keep moving” (in sumptuous raised blue on blue paint) accompanied by paintings of four feet, two in earthy shades with two others in primary colors. There is a list of the various dimensions of a man, perhaps in terms of desired wellness, while another counters a word list of negative emotions, with “agape,” a word meaning the highest form of love and charity. That same piece features the name of the show while it very obviously questions savagery, but whose?

Finally, the single piece that does not contain a face is one of the most effective. On the black and white background, it does contain a single foot and a chunky brown chain (as do at least two two other pieces) in a work that is simultaneously the most Cubist and Modern as well as the one with the most Postmodern enlarged text cut outs, all stacked up like a racist tree trunk left behind by JACDO, who has found the door.

Priska Juschka, the proprietor of Lichtundfire said, “His bold compositions that openly make the connection to indigenous art, are literally layered with painful historical truths that so many cultures have suffered and endured.” WM