GEOLOGIES

As a farmer’s son, Henri Jacobs (1957) often stood upside down in the sand, the poor high sandy soils of the Kempen region of North Brabant. To dig and harvest potatoes, to plant and cut asparagus, to pick Brussels sprouts. The surface therefore interests him, the horizontal surface of the landscape on which we walk, in which we plow and plant, in which we dig and trot on.

Soil, sand, earth, fields, the surface erodes, dries out, cracks, folds, subsides, impoverishes, is exhausted and tired. From this awareness of the surface, Jacobs creates paper braids from two or more sheets of colored, drawn or printed paper. These braids are assembled into a book that is presented lying down and that you leaf through. The magic of the book is the two-sidedness of each leaf, the element of recto – verso that seems so obvious but makes the leaf in the book unique. Flipping the pages is counting time, ticking away seconds, minutes, hours.

Beneath the surface that is constantly manipulated lie the geologies, lies the bed that carries the surface. Painted relief illusions of meandering folds, cracks and fissures depict the geological layers of the earth. Jacobs’ zigzag drawings are grafted onto the grid, the grid that makes the paper manageable and calms down the wind that blows. A grid gives grip, takes possession, occupies and removes the void by replacing and occupying it with subtle dots at regular intervals.