Yvonne Jacquette:
Arrivals & Departures
March 15 - April 22, 2006
Opening Reception Saturday, March 18 from 4:00 to 6:00 pm

Yvonne Jacquette: Arrivals & Departures focuses on the artist’s recent aerial views depicting a wide range of locales and landscapes in the U.S. and abroad. Several of the locations, such as New York City and Maine, are sites that Jacquette has long been familiar with and has painted before, while others, such as the Engadin Valley in Switzerland and Halong Bay in Vietnam, are new places she had not visited previously and may never return to again. This blend of the familiar and the unknown is at the heart of the exhibition. A color catalogue with an essay by Nathan Kernan is available.

“Jacquette’s painting technique is transparent; her paint is never not itself. She wants us to see how it’s done, to see all the stitching,” writes Nathan Kernan in the catalogue essay. “This matter-of-fact transparency of the painterly mark may partly be traced to the Abstract-Expressionists, though divested of their histrionic gestures…Jacquette’s paint handling participates directly in the meaning of the image, recapitulating not just the appearance but generative forces inherent in the subject, particularly in cityscapes, where the vibrant, staccato marks of paint hum with urban energy.”

Yvonne Jacquette’s work concentrates on the physical and subjective features of cityscapes and landscapes as viewed from airplanes and high buildings. Many of her paintings and pastels incorporate multiple perspectives or composite viewpoints while in others feathery brush-strokes abstract and soften the physical features of the landscape. Her work combines elements of abstraction and representation, pattern and grid, surface and illusion, and observation, imagination, and memory, illuminating the beauty, energy, complexity and condition of the contemporary landscape and reveling in its unusual juxtapositions and paradoxes.

Most of Jacquette’s paintings begin as pastel sketches that juxtapose multiple views from airplane windows or elevated rooms. Following this direct observation the paintings are developed in the studio, with Jacquette carefully marking the surfaces with small strokes in bright hues, often against dark expanses. This enables the finished paintings to retain the spontaneous feel of the pastels and to register the effects of light, whether natural or electric, on the land.

Works in the exhibition include: Red Rock Canyon Triptych and Lake Triptych, two three part paintings depicting sites in Utah, Colorado, and Texas; a new series of paintings and pastels of Maine focusing on the prevalence of shopping malls, parking lots, and big box stores in the landscape; New York City scenes showing Times Square, Third Avenue, Battery Park, and lower Manhattan; and views of Sapa and Halong Bay in Vietnam, the Engadin Valley in Switzerland, and Napa Valley, South Carolina marshes, and downtown Philadelphia in the U.S. It has become fashionable in recent years to say that the world has become more and more homogenous, that every place looks like every other place and that the typical traveler no longer has any sense of the uniqueness of a given location. Yvonne Jacquette, however, is no typical traveler, and as she circumnavigates the globe, virtually everywhere she goes she finds something unique, distinctive, and worthy of acute examination.

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DC Moore Gallery specializes in twentieth century and contemporary art. The gallery is located on the eighth floor of 724 Fifth Avenue between 56th and 57th Streets and is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 to 5:30. Press viewings can be arranged prior to the exhibition. For more information, for photographs, or to arrange a viewing, please call Sandra Paci at 212-247-2111