Artist Jacob Kassay is currently showing at Xavier Hufkens till 14th June 2012.

In the first room, a series of ‘paintings’ is exhibited that have been created from studio remnants – each piece, before being stretched over its support, was once part of a larger piece of canvas purchased at an art supply store with the intention of being used. The artist kept these scraps, with the vague idea that, one day, they might be useful in his studio. Perhaps they’d be handy for wiping brushes, or could be mounted on a smaller stretcher? Thus the canvas fragments made their way from New York to Los Angeles, the city to which the artist recently moved. These fragments, so anonymous on the one hand, yet such poignant reminders of method and making on the other, remained untouched until they re-presented themselves as an opportunity for a pragmatic platform.

The ‘paintings’ shown here do not, in fact, contain any pigment other than the occasional use of primer, nor are they based upon anything tangible. These are paintings that exist without the involvement of conscious decision; they are images, yet they represent nothing. The idea that a painting is based upon something implies understanding and recognition; these blank canvases do deprive one of these possibilities. And because of the burden of the progressive nature of life, they should not be seen as a new chapter in the artist’s oeuvre, but simply for what they are: absolutely ignorant repositories in which reside the notion that thoughts provoked by a conscious, or subconscious, experience can never be truly eradicated.

(text source: Xavier Hufkens)

(Image: Jacob Kassay; Installation views, Courtesy: the Artist and Xavier Hufkens, Brussels, © Allard Bovenberg, Amsterdam.)

Jacob Kassay (b. 1984,  Lewiston, NY)

Just twenty-five years old, New York-based artist Jacob Kassay pursues the lineage of paintings as places for light and shadow. With their shimmering silver surfaces, his canvases transform blankness into aura and emptiness into reflection. These paintings have no color, no paint, and no image, but as objects in space, they take on all the lights, shadows, colors, and images of their surroundings.  These are paintings about the experience of being in a room with a painting.

Kassay likes to install his paintings in groups, preferably in corners, and the slightly varying textures, colors, reflections, and burns within each work create a silent symphony of differences.  Like Terry Riley’s minimalism—one of the artist’s favorite composers—when paintings are shown together they contain the ebb-and-flow of repetitions that don’t quite repeat. In fact, music is a useful way to describe Kassay’s work: if John Cage uses a prepared piano, submitting it to a rigorous system of chance-based operations, Kassay uses a prepared canvas.

(text source: Artist's Website)

Jacob Kassay's works are also part of an ongoing group show at CCA Andratx Art Centre till 23rd Sep. 2012.

Education:  Bachelor of Fine Arts, State University of New York, Buffalo, NY, 2005.

More information here...(ArtSlant Profile) (Artist's Website) (Gallery)

(Image on top right: Jacob Kassay, Installation views; © Allard Bovenberg, Amsterdam / Courtesy: the Artist and Xavier Hufkens, Brussels)