Devorah Jacoby: Inside Out at Seager/Gray

Painter Devorah Jacoby has always presented a complex internal world in her works. Coming to her career in art after a practice in psychotherapy, she is familiar with the intricacies of the mind and the dances we perform in response to our emotions and surroundings. In her latest body of work Inside Out, currently on view at Seager Gray Gallery, this world is inhabited primarily by women—women often lost in thought, submerged in a landscape that at times obscures or threatens to engulf them.

Jacoby’s surfaces are juicy, her command of oil paint is deft and joyous—here expressing a surprising and at times flamboyant melding of styles from pointillism to realism to splatters, knife painting, and even occasionally including some glitter. Outside (2022) features a woman in a full, swirling green skirt. Eyes closed, she is in and of nature. The upper half of the canvas is scraped and scumbled, scratched and marked with orange drips and a periwinkle blue outline, like a butterfly. Here, as elsewhere, a pattern of rectangular blocks of color suggests a broad pointillist stroke as well as a bit of the geometrical abstract passages in Gustave Klimt.

With the subtext of the pandemic shutdown and how all our lives were upended as a kind of undergirding principle, Jacoby’s tense, often dysfunctional or emotionally-fraught human dynamics have let up a bit in most of these works, as if finding relief from the challenges of daily life in painting the beauty of nature tipped the scales away from too much psychological tension. The artist spent time in Wyoming during shelter-in-place, and found abundant inspiration in the landscape. Jacoby uses gardens, plants, and in particular flowers to repeatedly draw the eye, and cause it to linger, in moments of pure pleasure.

Appearing in two versions, I Can Feel Your Heart Beating (2022) evokes some of the darker regions of Jacoby’s world, as an introspective young girl holds a disembodied heart in front of her white jumper. The words evoke a sweet moment of lovers, perhaps, in close embrace, while the more clinical vision presented suggests an opposite reading, something rent asunder, death, disease, or perhaps love gone bad. We may also recall the iconic works of Frida Kahlo, where externalized organs symbolize the physical and emotion pain which that artist endured.

Reading (2022) is an excuse for more juicy brushwork, an explosion of pattern including folds of creamy tones marked with yellow and orange splotches, a profusion of wild daisies forming a dense blanket in the foreground. Two parted feet and ankles draw the viewer inward, to an ambiguously rendered interior space. A blurry red form, the book, dissolves into a blotchy sky of blue and pink. The absence of a head or upper body offers a bit of a shock, and can be read a humorous, or disquieting, or both.

Fruits de Terre (2022) is the star of the exhibition. A red room houses woman clutching a Toy Poodle, the scene conveying a European Modernist vibe echoing Matisse and Manet. A red vase, patterned with the recurring rectangular color blocks, holds assorted flowers in warm hues, an array of food, salads, strawberry shortcake, even crustaceans, creating a tour de force of color and texture. Adding to the visual texture are charcoal lines delineating a cake and various cooking implements.

Lilypad (2022), a mid-sized vertical work, is mysterious, dark in hue and subject matter. A female form is splayed out across a horse. A bright red pattern wraps her body, reading alternately as fabric marked by pattern, or more disturbingly, as blood. Rough green circles, the pads of the title, fill the lower portion of the canvas. The woman’s leg and foot hang limply along those of the horse, one may well wonder exactly what kind of nocturnal ride has just transpired.

In Flowers All Year (2016-2022) it is interesting to explore how the bouquet dissolves into geometry and gesture simultaneously, as does a woman’s face on its right, her right eye obscured by a giant orange rose. This bounty of flowers, a recurring device in the show, thus becomes a bit menacing, is this a surfeit of pleasure?

Horizon (2022) forces the issue of the figure’s immersion in the paint, bringing the rectangular marks front and center, a small nude seen from the rear appears as if in an attempt to pry them apart and enter the space. Starfish (2022), a dreamy exploration of every shade of blue, features a tiny form of the sea creature alongside a girl in a red bathing suit, a foil to all the cool hues. This work is one of the most successful in allowing the viewer to become vicariously immersed in the beauty and tranquility of nature.

Jacoby is a gifted painter, her skillful mix of generous swaths of seductive color and creamy paint entice the viewer into a space where the mental world intersects with the visual, introspection meshed with observation. Yet here, in this body of work, the figures appear strikingly and unmistakably alone, the only narrative one we may construct as to how and why they are isolated. Certainly an apt device for a dark time of social distancing, yet Jacoby’s disarming use of the power of nature to soothe and delight us ultimately puts a surprisingly positive spin on a time that has been anything but.

Barbara Morris