Van Doren Waxter www.vandorenwaxter.com and CHART, www.chartgallery.com

a new collaborative space in Tribeca opened by Clara Ha, are pleased to announce Jackie Saccoccio: Femme Brut, a two-venue exhibition of the American artist’s paintings, drawings, and prints to go on view at 23 East 73rd Street from January 22 to March 14, 2020 and at 74 Franklin Street from January 22 to March 21, 2020. Saccoccio is admired for her radiant abstractions and an expanding use of the canvas as a painting tool. Her adventurous body-aware practice and formal concerns align her with contemporary painters recognized for pushing the medium. A recipient of an American Academy in Rome Prize and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, Saccoccio has exhibited continuously since her White Columns White Room debut in 2001.

An allusion to Jean Dubuffet’s “Art Brut,” his definition for raw, emotional work made outside of the academy, Saccoccio’s expansive, physical, and unapologetic Femme Brut is, for what the artist states as “abstraction at full throttle.” The works to go on view are characterized by a muscular urgency and evidence formal interests in space and scale. The unabashed bravado of the newest canvasses recall artist and art critic Thomas Micchelli’s comment that while Saccoccio’s work contains “echoes of Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler,” it is her “exploitation of every conceivable mode of applying paint” that “grounds the work in pure painting and distinguishes it as a post-painting phenomenon.”

Her most recent canvasses, all 2019, are characterized by globules, spheres, washes, and fictitious architecture, which she likens to the “explosive nature of a tempest,” a reference to Shakespeare’s tragedy that deals with storms, sorcery, and enchantment, such as a pair of epically scaled, highly activated oil and oil pastel on linen paintings measuring 130 x 94 inches.

Another works, La Source de la Loue, 114 x 94 inches, oil, oil pastel and mica on linen, returns to a favorite, Courbet’s painting of the same title, presenting a buoyant palette to his somber tones, while echoing his cavernous space absent of horizon line. Saccoccio cites his ability to convey both volume AND vacuum whether it be rock, cave, stag or pubis as her guide. Her subsequent 79 inch monotype paintings further ruminate on this solidity and transparency. The work emanates a menacing energy despite its layered passages of rose, lime, citrus orange, and bone that is at once warped and non-sensical, and as part of what Saccoccio describes as a “stage for a floating chrysalis.”

The artist draws inspiration from art history, contemporary practice, literature, and cinema and is known for an affecting body of chromatic large-scale, body-aware paintings, working in a mode that favors chance, gravity, time and control. She tips, drags, and shakes her paintings over one another, accumulating webs of space, manipulating them as prints, so that one serves as plate, the other as paper. The resulting orbicular centers reflect a conversation between the layers that include atomized color, painted and drawn, perspectival views of pixelation, printmaking and the results of her alchemical combinations.