Saccoccio’s Portrait series combines numerous contrasting styles of application from drips and blurs to spills and smudges; a built up maze of overlapping colour and marks makes it difficult to know where one layer ends and the next begins. The further they travel from their original, representational source the more they take on their own material presence; a visual dance emerges between painting styles and mark making from throughout art history that Saccoccio has blended together but deftly avoided blending in.
Text by Gemma de Cruz
“I hope my work elicits ideas about impermanence, as Jasper Johns and Tony Smith do for me.â€
It may come as a surprise that the starting point for Jackie Saccoccio’s paintings is portraiture from the 15-1600s, specifically the work of Holbein, Correggio and Ghirlandaio. While these art historical heavyweights might provide an initial inspiration, Saccoccio’s influences range from the landscapes of the Hudson River School, to the dazzling energy found in the work of second generation American abstract expressionist Joan Mitchell.
It is perhaps her interest in representations of the epic, natural American landscape, combined with the expressive freedom found in post-war abstraction, that gives Saccoccio’s paintings a unique light and a pictorial depth that is particularly uncommon and difficult to categorise.
So, while her final works can contain up to 50 layers of paint, they retain a harmonious balance between the seriousness of painting and an incredible, ethereal airiness that she describes as “maybe celestial or spiritual; definitely transcendent”.
