TEXT BOOK
Sam Jackson Retrospective: Fifteen Years
Tom Morton, 2023
In You Can’t Wrap Your Arms Around a Memory (2019), the painting’s title appears on an elegant young woman’s forehead. We might recognize these words as a slightly garbled echo of the 1978 Johnny Thunders ballad You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory (sample lyric: “it doesn’t pay to try”), which has been interpreted as a heroin addict’s lament. This is of a piece with the words on her chest, ‘THE EXACT NATURE OF OUR WRONGS’, a reference to the 2017 novel of that name by Janet Peery, which charts an American family’s struggles with substance abuse. Then there’s the repeated painted refrain ‘LAST NITE’, which is borrowed from the title of a 2001 track by The Strokes. Against a jaunty, garage rock jangle, it tells the tale of a young woman suffering from depression, whose callous lover responds that he ‘don’t care no more / I know this for sure / I’m walking out that door’. Looking at Jackson’s painting, we might delicately piece together a narrative of mental crisis, heartless abandonment, an attempt to find solace in the numbing undertow of narcotics, and the ineradicable pain of loss. Working with (pop) cultural fragments, and their hazy persistence in our memories, the artist gives us not just a portrait of sorts, but a glimpse of its subject’s possible backstory, the secrets she might guard behind her wary, soulful stare. No wonder she weeps, although the teardrops that fall from her eyes are not rivulets of liquid paint, but rather hemispherical dots of cold pearlescent plastic. Glued to the surface of the picture plane, they both point to the image’s artificiality, and lend it extra pathos. Who might believe in – or value – tears like these?
Silent, impassive and intensely watchful, the people who stare out of Sam Jackson’s compact, mutedly luminous paintings feel like they’re guarding a secret. It might be a transgressive thought they’ve had, or a shameful deed that they’ve committed, or maybe they’re survivors of some monstrous trauma, the bearers of invisible, throbbing scars. While they possess the striking beauty of youth, they have none of its blitheness or its candour. What is it that they’re hiding from us?
Perhaps the answer – as the idiomatic English phrase has it – is written all over their faces. They are certainly beset by text, which Jackson scrawls, scratches and sprays across their features, in a manner that recalls at once stick-and-poke tattoos and graffiti on a school desk, the branding of criminals and a swarm of comments feeding on a juicy social media post. Given how reserved Jackson’s subjects seem to be (an impression that’s only exacerbated by the fact they often sport what look like 19th-century clothing and hairstyles), it’s a little shocking to see them treated with such apparent violence. And yet, it’s possible that these words have not been visited on these youths by some outside force, but are rather outward manifestations of their inner emotional states – feelings that have seeped up, unbidden, from the deepest reaches of their psyches, and have announced themselves on the soft, vulnerable surface of their skins.
Jackson’s portrait works often leave us to fill in an information gap. What is it about the young man in Made in Heaven (2022) that indicates he might have been formed in the celestial realm, and where is the young woman’s partner in Lovers From Hell (2014)? Our answers will depend upon our own experiences and prejudices, the unique contours of our desires and fears. While these are works that in several respects foreground surfaces, what they really demand is that we reach down deep into ourselves. This is also true of what we might term Jackson’s sex paintings. In these frank and often explicit images, the artist depicts anonymous people coming together in an array of erotic encounters, their bodies emerging from the sticky murk of his pigment like some primordial form of life. Is what they are seeking, here, mere physical release, or is it something more dangerous, and ultimately much more liberating: an effacing of the self? In The Club, a foot stretches across the composition from the left, driving its toes into a blindfolded (or perhaps eyeless) face, and squashing the nose and mouth it finds there into a blur of sickly-looking paint. It might be a painting of sex or death, an answer to the call of Eros or of Thanatos. Either way, what the participants in this scene are seeking is a form of oblivion.
Knowing how preoccupied Jackson is with how humans serially push at the limits of experience, it perhaps comes as a surprise to learn that he also paints floral motifs. No bigger than a smartphone, The Flower (2009) is an atomic explosion of impasto pigment, in which precise botanical details are collapsed into an impression of vigorously blooming life. Contemplating this work – with its fleshy reds, its fatty yellows, its bone-whites emerging against a dark, forbidding background – I get to thinking not of plant matter, but of interior of the body. This, it seems to me, is a painting about turning ourselves inside out, and exposing all the dark, ugly, potentially shaming stuff that we’ve been hiding away for so long. This is an act of self-destruction – our protective outer shell cracks and falls away – yet it’s also one of self-creation. Every flower, after all, needs light to grow.
Copyright Tom Morton, 2023
Images by @itsjamiejames.
Sam Jackson Retrospective: Fifteen Years is open daily at GIANT until Saturday 7th October, 2023.
