32 pages - text by Luca Massimo Barbero (Italian/English)
16 colour reproductions - 13 black/white
€ 10
Space... is formed, traveled through, and heard. He suspends in order to meditate, he maneuvers those full/ empty paradoxical masses and, in a contemporary poem, imprisons water, light, geometry, pattern or ‘landscape’, and makes them sing together. It is as though in man’s experience nature is materialized both positively and negatively. The parts do not negate each other but interpenetrate and have the same source: they fascinate each other. And this happens in anything but a superficial way: it is the result of great curiosity, as though the eye had become a detective and the act of making simply a way of embodying these endless yet exact inquiries. Jacob reflects on the multiple essence of concretizing space, as though in his mind he had found a measurement-molecule fascinated by space and which wanted to materialize it, make it useable and visible but without overdoing it, without arriving at a heavy sense of realism. It is this extraordinary and at times (as we shall see) dangerous fascination that almost literally attacks you on entering one of his shows. Suddenly you find yourself among hundreds or thousands of units, fragments completed to form a whole, suspended marks that distribute themselves in space and form it, giving it new life rather than occupying it. And there you are, amazed and transfixed, virtually suspended yourself, counting and visually journeying through these materials (which in the past have been silk, paper, fabric) and these thousands of threads that hold up and make possible this new world ... And this is the first, elementary phase.
And then a kind of revelation makes you abandon resistance: there is no longer any decoration, any manual virtuosity or mathematical repetition, there is just the work that draws itself together, breathes, moves, and allows you to respire in another way: with the eyes, here in this room. An absolute variable is what Jacob’s past installations categorically recall.
For some years I have literally spied on his work on the few occasions I’ve been able to see it in Italy. At times I’ve experienced it briefly, at others with an almost indecent stare, almost obsessively analytical, searching every detail, each knot, link, bamboo spill, stitch or whatever. Then I allowed the images to sediment in time and, late one morning in Verona, he and I met and got to know each other without talking about the work, listening to the music he plays while hanging his show and ... Without any taping, we chatted civilly using as our excuse for talking the waters of the river Adige running nearby. … “
For some years I have literally spied on his work on the few occasions I’ve been able to see it in Italy. At times I’ve experienced it briefly, at others with an almost indecent stare, almost obsessively analytical, searching every detail, each knot, link, bamboo spill, stitch or whatever. Then I allowed the images to sediment in time and, late one morning in Verona, he and I met and got to know each other without talking about the work, listening to the music he plays while hanging his show and ... Without any taping, we chatted civilly using as our excuse for talking the waters of the river Adige running nearby. … “
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