In his second show with the gallery, Jonah Sack presents a series of drawings on canvas, in brush and ink and in oil. The drawings depict a man working with hand tools: sawing, swinging an axe, using a wrench to hammer in a nail. In most of the images his head is down, and his focus is on the task at hand. They are a series of actions, not of goals or achievements. There is no context or background, nor even any materials or objects for him to work on. He stands with his legs apart to brace himself for the work, but no work is done. There is a saw, but no cutting.
The immediacy of each action undermines any heroic connotations of the man’s Stakhanovite poses. They are further eroded by the inclusion of a picture of him pulling on his jeans at the start of the working day. He is caught in a moment of vulnerability, a state of everyday ridiculousness. This quality of exposure is also echoed in the artist’s drawing technique. The oil sketches, as much as the brush and ink pieces, are clearly drawings rather than paintings. They present a record of the act of mark-making, with its second thoughts and corrections, along with its moments of clarity and precision. In these drawings the opposed poles of accuracy and error, and of purpose and process, mark out the space of action.
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Jonah Sack (b. Johannesburg, 1978) lives and works in Cape Town. He studied at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and received his MFA from the Glasgow School of Art. He has been a fellow of the Skye Foundation and the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts at the University of Cape Town. Sack has had solo exhibitions in Johannesburg and Cape Town and has exhibited in group shows internationally, including at the Roskilde Museum of Contemporary Art and the Jewish Museum in New York. His collaboration with Francis Burger, the Independent Publishing Project, was installed at blank projects in 2011. Catalogue of Errors is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.
The immediacy of each action undermines any heroic connotations of the man’s Stakhanovite poses. They are further eroded by the inclusion of a picture of him pulling on his jeans at the start of the working day. He is caught in a moment of vulnerability, a state of everyday ridiculousness. This quality of exposure is also echoed in the artist’s drawing technique. The oil sketches, as much as the brush and ink pieces, are clearly drawings rather than paintings. They present a record of the act of mark-making, with its second thoughts and corrections, along with its moments of clarity and precision. In these drawings the opposed poles of accuracy and error, and of purpose and process, mark out the space of action.
—
Jonah Sack (b. Johannesburg, 1978) lives and works in Cape Town. He studied at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and received his MFA from the Glasgow School of Art. He has been a fellow of the Skye Foundation and the Gordon Institute for Performing and Creative Arts at the University of Cape Town. Sack has had solo exhibitions in Johannesburg and Cape Town and has exhibited in group shows internationally, including at the Roskilde Museum of Contemporary Art and the Jewish Museum in New York. His collaboration with Francis Burger, the Independent Publishing Project, was installed at blank projects in 2011. Catalogue of Errors is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.
