Portrait (Reverse)

Jackie Saccoccio works with a clear and often unexpected sense of her artistic forebears, and in Portrait (Reverse), she synthesises unusual sources to powerful effect. Citing artists ranging from Ghirlandaio and Titian to Lichtenstein and Yuskavage, Saccoccio has also claimed influence from the landscape paintings of Hudson River School. Indeed, the palette of this painting, dominated by a drama of milky blues, whites and blacks against broadbrush sunset hues, recalls scenes of sky or sea by Bierstadt or Cropsey – only any tranquility that the work’s colouring might invoke is lost in the visceral physicality of the paint’s application. Flashes of paint poured in striking pink, red and cobalt collect around the painting’s edges, while frenetic lines of trailed pigment record Saccoccio’s method of turning the painting and allowing the wet paint to flow around the canvas. Here the obvious touchstones are the Abstract Expressionists – Saccoccio associates her work particularly with Joan Mitchell and Jasper Johns – but Saccoccio’s work uses similar methods to ask different questions. Less concerned with the kind of spiritual and spontaneous expression of self associated with much Abstract Expressionism, Saccoccio instead works from notes, using the dynamism of action painting’s techniques in order to achieve something more pre-meditated. ‘Usually, I think a painting is done when I feel a reconnection to the ideas I originally had,’ she says, ‘they never look like what I expected them to look like, but they have something about them.’ In this sense, then, her method blurs the specific qualities of her artistic intentions and influences, while sustaining a more intangible quality that lives on in the finished work.