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They are silhouettes, abreviations, ciphers, stencils and proxies cut out from plastic foil and living on multi-layered canvas backgrounds. Androgynous figures and shapes which seem to squat on the ground as if paralyzed by visions of violence and terror. Figures sitting on a stool like Rodin‘s Thinker all the while having already risen up to the weightlessnes of a transgredient existence while others seem frozen in a contrapost position or having snapped to attention in a rigid line. Figures force- and purposefully running across the canvas with raised fists as if symbolizing a simple act of liberation. Like physical states of our existence these mysterious doppelgangers illustrate how emotion may be expressed by motion.
Most of the cut out figures exist in direct dialogue with their immediate inverse shape thrown onto the canvas by their own shadows. This exchange takes place without words or writing and the dialogue works effortlessly not only between the protagonists but also between them and the beholder. An identification process with the faceless and anonymous figures has already taken place. The beholder has already slipped into the lifeless husks and just like them crouches, arests, runs right into his/her reality and its challenges. Marie Anne Jakob is expressing her ideas with a vehement quality. Her collage-technique pictures are ideal surfaces for projecting attitudes and physical states. They serve to refer the beholder back to himself by pointing out the interaction between body language and emotional state.
The spaces in which theses figures move around and conduct their dialogues are restless and broken-up colour backgrounds with their different multiple layers applied by brush, spackle and oftentimes directly by hand of the artist. This tactile intervention in the painting process is a specific trait of her works. Without the application of this particular technique her works would undoubtedly have less of an aura than they actually do.
Marie Anne Jakob’s „Cycle #5, Figures“ was completed between 1995 and 1998 and so far comprises of 15 tableaus done in oil-on-canvas technique. The ever present figures are partly painted on but are mostly cut from plastic or felt and placed as silhouttes directly onto the carrier surface, thus emphasizing a certain reproductive quality. Most of the time the oil-on-canvas works are accompanied by drawings, gouaches and water colours so that the works around „Cycle #5“ are running to a total of about a hundred pieces. This may well serve as a hint towards the intensity with which the artist has applied herself to her subject matter. When surveying the whole body of works in its entirety it is significant that Marie Anne Jakob‘s stroke sports a sketch-pad like and spontaneous quality – there are no grave differences in style and expression (save for the actual size of the pieces) between her works on paper and the works done in oil-on-canvas. Actually, the artist herself attributes equal importance to the drawings as she does to the more elaborate paintings.
The motif of figural shapes, as it appears in ever varried forms in „Cycle #5, Figures“, was then supplemented and transcended by later works where symbols and hints towards imaginary space were introduced into the pieces. The beginning of this phase is marked by the 1997/1998 group exhibition „Mehrzellig“ (Multi-Celled) at the Kunsthaus Hamburg, for which the artist created the installation piece „Archiv der Evolution“ (Archive of the Evolution). The visitor was lead into a 12‘x 6‘ cubicle/cell and was confronted by his/her doppelganger and an array of writings on the subject of evolution. Thus the artist succeeded in pointing out the concept of a cell as a living environment and the source of all life at the same time. In her latest body of works „Shift“, shown at Westwerk Hamburg starting May 18th, the human figure as such is now absent. But still the human being is ever present and makes for the focal point of the works – subject matter being now human living conditions: those dictated by nature and those created by man himself. In this context the works also point toward altered perceptions of time, space and reality, motion and orientation. In fact, it is the „Cycle #5, Figures“ which creates the vital base for all the following groups of works – including „Shift“: switching, re-thinking, shifting, changing, change of positions.
Jutta Martens
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