JACKSON – VALLOIS
At the end of the 1960s, art in California (a history still written in the masculine) was dominated by two distinct and opposing trends: Light and Space – minimalism and reduction to the essential by Robert Irwin – and assemblage – installation and maximalism at the Ferus Gallery founded by Walter Hopps and Edward Kienholz. On the fringes of this two-lane highway, isolated temperaments gradually emerged, tackling the limits of art’s mediums and questioning this duality: Bas Jan Ader, Michael Asher, John Baldessari, Guy de Cointet, David Lamelas
and Richard Jackson.
Born in Sacramento in 1939 under the sign of Leo, Richard Jackson says he grew up with tools not books and claims to have been influenced by Abstract Expressionism and Jackson Pollock’s Action Painting, cathartically pushing his homage to the New York painter to extremes – even to the obscene – by flooding the surface of his installations with paint.
Thanks to his radical use of colour (splashing, squirting, spraying and shooting), his work has been compared to an outrageous version of Yves Klein and Niki de Saint Phalle’s Nouveau Réalisme. With his Action Painting and his painting machines, made from scratch and equipped with pipes spitting out eruptions of colour, Richard Jackson is above all the missing link between the Viennese Actionists and his American contemporaries Paul McCarthy and Bruce Nauman. He was also one of a host among Californian artists (Chris Burden, Mike Kelley,
Raymond Pettibon, Charles Ray) and writers (Charles Bukowsky, Dennis Cooper) involved in MOCA’s cult exhibition, the grotesque and macabre Helter Skelter (1992) dedicated to the disruptive forms of 1990s L.A. in which he was a maverick, remembering how the public had to lean against his installation to better
appreciate Kelley’s work…