c & d chapter 1 / three small canvases

smart & stupid

Creation & Destruction =
Apollonian & Dionysian
Good & Bad
Smart & Stupid
Order & Chaos
Civilisation & Barbarism
Love & Hate
Compassion & Aggression
Beauty & Ugliness

first three destructions

Three small surfaces for paintings (linen on stretchers) from about 30 x 50 cm are mutilated with sandpaper, with a cutter and with an awl. The action, or performance of destroying itself is filmed. Soon, within two weeks, the editing will be done and the film will be shown here.

surface research continuation

Web-master Rietje from the Rietveld Academie posted the film about drawing and erasing the eighth palimpsest on Vimeo:
Surface Research by Henri Jacobs.
The Surface Research project is probably going to continue next year. Currently I am writing a text about the continuation of the project. Foreseeing a series of drawings on creation and destruction. Systematically executed on three different sorts of paper, and each paper-sort will get it's specific drawing material. Epson photo paper is going to be drawn with ink, 200 grams drawing paper is going to be drawn with pencil and 500 grams watercolour paper is going to be drawn with aquarelle paint. Drawing has to happen to create "value" that can be destroyed.
Soon, when the text about the continuation of the project is ready, it will be posted on this weblog.
I imagine that filming the creation and destruction process will be the best way of documenting this new Surface Research chapter.
A bientôt...

lecture PhDArts

Last Saturday the 6th of February I had the opportunity to give a lecture at the symposium "the artist as researcher". It was a two-day international conference on artistic research and PhD in visual art and design at the Royal Academy of the Arts (KABK) in The Hague. It was a well visited conference and a lot of discussion was going on the subject how to do a PhD in visual art and what the institution could necessarily ask, a written thesis and an artwork?
Herewith I would like to let see and read my lecture on "surface research". A point of view on the subject is to read in the text, enjoy it...



I am Henri Jacobs, Dutch artist living and working in Brussels, and I was invited to start the first Rietveld Research Residency.
In september 2009 the Gerrit Rietveld Academie initiated a Research Residency. The Rietveld Research Residency (RRR) is a cooperation of the Rietveld Academie and Fonds BKVB to create a research site for mid career artists. They are enabled for a period of 1 to 3 years to do a clearly defined artistic research project, within the framework of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. The artist will work in the Pavilion of the Academy and will report twice a year on the research project. There are also an agreed number of educational projects foreseen.
This Rietveld Research Residency doesn’t foresee in a route during years to study and doing research for a PhD in Art. It is a residency for concentration on a specific aspect of the existing work by the invited artist. It is a possibility to create time to go deeper into theoretical and material details of the oeuvre. In the lee of the art market...

first film

(note : perhaps you have to press the space bar to start the film)

This first video film, of about 10 minutes, on erasing and drawing a text wants to show the making of a layered palimpsest. The text which is going to be white-out is a quote from Cioran : "Each of us must pay for the slightest damage he inflicts upon a universe created for indifference and stagnation, sooner or later he will regret not having left it intact". A new layer of text is going to be constructed on the erased Cioran quote : (...) to be far beyond terror and pity and to be the eternal lust of becoming itself - that lust which also involves the lust of destruction. This Nietzsche citation is also going to be white-out. At the end this palimpsest keeps over the residues of circle parts from the different letters.
Filming drawing and making a montage which is not to tedious is "autre chose" than drawing itself. Even though drawing is a slow process, filming it can show the act itself in a efficient and not too boring way. Perhaps it is a adequate manner to research drawing. Soon I am going to film drawing with a subject that is not so neatly constructed as these palimpsests. I want to try to evoke in the most simple way what drawing can be. I want to evoke how the simple act of drawing is working.