Depth Charges

paper. The show’s title references Seamus Heaney’s consideration of poems and individual words as ‘depth charges’, a concept also explored by Jackowski employing the same metaphor in his distillation of both objects and figures in small and powerful paintings, intensified through the omission of any external light and analogous to poems in their exploration of resonance, metaphor and meaning. As John McEwan says in his review (Spectator, 4/5/2005): '"depth charge" is used in the catalogue to describe the effect [of the works] in the sense that their force is densely contained and profound. It is certainly what Jackowski aspires to achieve.' In this body of new work undertaken since his first retrospective exhibition (output 1) in 2003, Jackowski continues his examination of memory and to refine images that encapsulate dispossession with increasingly refined attention to the performance and modulation of the thickness of paint, the surface and the quality of line that encapsulate the visual qualities of Tarkovsky’s films and Bausch’s choreographic evocations of childhood. Working on a series of works in parallel, Jackowski describes his methods as slow, working gradually to eliminate the initial image and removing what is false; he describes the process as a spatial metaphor, mirroring Berger’s ‘home is not a house’ and reflecting on: 'the mortar which holds the improvised home together – even for the child – is memory. Within it, tangible, visible mementoes are arranged – photos, trophies, souvenirs – but the rest and the four walls which safe-guard the lives within, these are invisible, intangible and biographical.' Reviews of this work were included in The Spectator, 14/5/2005, The Independent, 16/5/2005 and the Polish Times, 28/5/2005.