Jay Isaac, Energy Equation with Spectre (2017)

Jay Isaac
Energy Equation with Spectre
from High Gloss Ceilings
2017
acrylic on canvas
30 x 24 inches
 
 
“A determination to defy modernist strictures is signalled by the collective title of the “High Gloss Ceilings,” which teases purist sensibilities with a threatened breach of good taste. (For a time, Isaac’s side business as a commercial house painter even advertised reflective ceilings as a farcical alternative to de rigueur matte finish. Isaac’s answer to conceptual pedantry is the visual pun. Isaac’s sexualized forms frequently limn a digital imaginary of icons and emojis, as in the pear-like screw-in light bulb of Energy Equation with Spectre, 2017. Here, the bulb as a medium of electrified illumination implicitly glosses the screen as a primary arena of contemporary visual—and erotic—economies.”
Adam Lauder
 
Energy Equation with Spectre conceptualizes the process of creating in the context of external viewership. The “equation” in question is: author + the viewer = the painting. However, the equation presented is in flux and is influenced (in the quantum physics and interpersonal sense) by the subjective perception of a viewer.
 
The “spectre” is the unpredictable nature of anything outside of an author and is represented as a humorous haunting, residing in one of the most cliched, utilitarian representations of enlightenment.
 
The painting is a component of a series which asks the question, what does a painting reflect? The proposed answer is the viewer, the author and the painting. High Gloss Ceilings is a verbal pun on the term “glass ceiling” in that these works were a genesis of questioning my Lebanese heritage and asking how that ancestry influenced my experience as a creator as well as how that ancestry is viewed from the outside. While these works were made, I was a house painter and considered tropes of the trade as parallel to standards in art making. A ceiling is to always be painted in matte, never gloss. The ceiling is proposed as reflective, and therefore like the paintings, are self-portraits but also mirrors, relating aspects of my current personal fixations and socio-political observances.
 
This was the first series of work that parted from my previous, multi-year practice of process-based abstraction. The works in High Gloss Ceilings were planned before through a series of drawings and preliminary sketches created in Lisbon in the beginning of 2017. I became interested in a form of communication that was more overt and graphic, in the literal and metaphorical sense.
 
Energy Equation with Spectre is a visual pun in that it represents a formalized idea as the iconic subject of the painting. The purity of the image, the “idea”, is tainted by an abstract spectre. This spectre is a stand in for the questioning of intuition as a painter and the inevitable occurrence of outside perspective influencing the creative experience.