Grotesque Images
Sympathetic Nonetheless
By Margaret Hawkins
Chicago Sun-Times  

In his second one-man show at Zg Gallery in about a year, recent School of the Art Institute grad Jacobsen offers up a world of lovingly painted grotesques in which anguished attention is paid to every pustule and misshapen face.  Here its humanity at its familiar worst and yet the artist treats these debased figures with compassion.  There is something oddly biblical and medieval about the work, even as cartoonlike as it is.  You can’t help feeling sorry for these characters, as guilty as excess and ignorance as they are, since they seem so oblivious to their own self-imposed degradation.  Clearly, they are candidates for salvation.  Like the teeming tortured figures of Gothic Cathedrals, they’re supposed to remind us, the masses, of our own sinful natures.

Sloppy little girls with their underpants slipping down, cannibals, two headless slabs of meat coupling, a dandyish, bloated fish-faced creature blowing on a part horn stranded on his back:  These characters are a sorry lot, specimens of a humanity gone to seed and too foolish even to notice.

Perhaps the oddly religious feeling that comes from these candy colored paintings has something to do with the spirit of forgiveness with which Jacobsen paints them.  Here are the prodigal sons and daughters of modern life who blew their dignity on junk food and porn.  Jacobsen sums up the banality of our culture by pointing out that the deadliest sin practices these days is gluttony: evil is personified here by a big head, mustachioed slickster with an ice cream cone in one hand and a lollipop in the other.

The paintings are serious, despite titles that sound like tabloid headlines, and thier seriousness come partly from how they are painted.  Underneath the grotesquerie and humor is real technique, one that Jacobsen has cultivated to approximate the look of Dutch oil painting or egg tempera with layered glazes and delicate brushstrokes, and even the occasional fingerprint left behind to convey the hand-wrought, over-wrought sensibility with which he intends.

There is also something definitely unmodern in the way Jacobsen embraces ugliness in a culture where beauty is the standard, if not the norm.  Ultimately the paintings seem to have a moral quality like the old Dutch still lifes that first appear to just be beautiful but reveal themselves to be crawling with warnings of death and vanity.

These paintings are just the opposite, though.  At first these failed humans seem just gross and ugly but then take on a kind of pathos as we begin to empathize with them.  Failure and imperfection characterize the human condition, after all, Jacobsen seems to say, and if reform isn’t completely possible, perhaps some rehabilitation is.  One day the bloated fish man may slim down, roll over, stand up straight and walk away.