At the end of the 1960s, I began painting again. The human figure, which had troubled me for several years, found its way into my paintings disguised as semi-abstract signs and caricatural characters that popped from the painterly ground like knots of light or ghost-like figures concretizing space. 

Jacques Roch, Exit Art, Consensus Exhibition, 1986

A large group show of thirty-two artists representing the pluralistic aesthetic of the art world at that time, chosen from Exit Art’s artist files and weekly studio visits.

Jacques Roch is a painter that distributes seduction by reconstructing ornamental canvases. His beauty becomes aggressive when his French background becomes “Americain”. 

By painting in the way of that French tradition he is finding a language that accepts, denies and redefines those influences, He parodies beauty to show us that after modern is also a reconstruction of modernism. A traveler of caricature, he references color combos of transparent washes and surrealism with interventions of art brut and calligraphy, marking of drips and strokes, for the intense vocabulary of hallucinations and gestures, compositional graffiti of musical colors and hidden comics among expressionistic information. 

Painting of resistance, to rebuild and transform painting as nostalgia, an explosion for the text of the retina to remind us that there is still power in the stroke. Friction in colors that dance into his personal language, a repertoire for the incision, repossession and composition of a new breed of work that defines his voice in the silent medium of painting for the American and French culture to absorb.

Papo Colo

curator and cultural producer of Exit Art