Known primarily as an abstract artist, Jacob Van Schalkwyk uses lithographic ink as a medium for drawing and painting. His work on paper and aluminum conflates the distinction between drawing, painting, printmaking, and low relief sculpture. This series of lithographic drawings offer a nuanced look into the science of color theory, more specifically how a viewer’s eye responds to variations of hue.
Jacob van Schalkwyk (b.1979) holds his BFA in Drawing from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY, and a MAVA in Sculpture from Stellenbosch University. He spent 9 years in New York City experimenting with audio and visual performance techniques. Highlights include two stints as visiting artist at CalArts in 2005 and 2006, performing at Central Park Summerstage, the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2006, and touring South Africa with The Last Poets, also in 2006. He returned to South Africa – and to drawing – in 2008, where he exhibited regularly at GALLERY AOP and DKP in Johannesburg between 2011 and 2018. He fronted the Afrikaans punk band Jaco+Z-dog from 2009-2011. His novel The Alibi Club was published in Afrikaans and English by Penguin Random House in 2014. Van Schalkwyk is a research affiliate of the University of Stellenbosch, where he served as Head of Fine Arts between 2019-2020.
Into the dangerously ephemeral world of new abstraction, Jacob van Schalkwyk reintroduces ritual. Inspired by Qhang Qhang, a pigment dug from basalt, mixed with blood in ancient Khoisan rock paintings, Van Schalkwyk reminds us that abstraction is, after Jerry Saltz, a visionary tool – indeed, ‘one of the greatest visionary tools ever invented by human beings to imagine, decipher, and depict the world.’ It is not enough to say that abstraction expresses the unsayable. This is true. But abstraction is also a cipher for a truth that surpasses Reason, Consciousness, Meaning, Value, in a secularized world.
Combining ritual clay – ibomvu – and oil on canvas, Van Schalkwyk reconnects painting to the earth. Used in ancient Africa as skincare, a medicinal treatment for food poisoning, pain and mineral deficiency, in the creation of sacred pottery, ibomvu expresses the integrality of the body and art – the fact that art is an embodied form. For Van Schalkwyk, this focus is vital, for it frees expression from mere commodification, and channels art’s far greater consolatory power.
Art is human all too human. Art is not merely a brand name, not merely ‘decorator-friendly’, a clever idea, some ‘frictionless’ trade exchange, worse, mere ‘visual Muzak’. For Jerry Saltz, rather, art changes one’s consciousness. Abstract art in particular can be life altering, precisely because it thrives ‘in the interstices between the ideal and the real, symbol and substance, the optic and the haptic, imagination and observation.’ Art at its best is a vision force.
Jacob van Schalkwyk fuses clay and oil, earth and soul, dream and substance. For him, art is a ceremonial practice. If the world is a void, it is because it lacks feeling, because it is denatured and vapid, cold, heartless, pointless. Which is why a fusion of ritual and art is vital, why in his art paint is raw, lines broken, squares off-kilter, the core thrust tangential.
One leans into the world.
