Jacques Roch’s most recent paintings explore the contingency of time/space relationships in the poetics of visual language. His sense of time is not set by a syncopated repetition or by any allusion to order and symmetry, but by primordial rhythms, variations, and interruptions. In his work, space escapes. It rejects mimetic three-dimensionality grounded by a common axis, and fully embraces the state of vertigo. These are land-escapes or interior-escapes of open color matter. Through a bird’s eye view, the viewer becomes the bird. Jacques’s familiar anthropomorphic tropes line up in a procession traversing his world of color fields, reconnecting with a world of dream or a dream world.

The drawings have a disruptive presence and are a prominent layer in Roch’s paintings as well. But his use of color mitigates their muted screams or chuckled laughter and introduces light and space that extend the dream into a revelation of cherished memory.here