PRESS RELEASE

Gallery Stalke presents the exhibition ‘The Last Kiss Goodnight’ by Frans Jacobi
March 10 – April 19, 2000

The exhibition consists of two installations, ‘Evening (Room 36)’ and ‘The Last Kiss Goodnight (Room 38)’, as well as the photo series ‘Imagine More’ and ‘Real Time Wind’.

Since the early 1990s, Frans Jacobi has worked on an extensive series of installations, the so-called ‘rooms.’ These are a series of atmospherically charged interiors where fragmented narratives are hinted at using simple scenographic elements. The works revolve around ‘grand’ emotions—love, melancholy, and pathos—yet always staged with a certain ironic twist.

To date, Frans Jacobi has created 38 of these ‘rooms.’ A significant number of them have only been shown abroad, as Jacobi has had an extensive exhibition activity in recent years. The works in this exhibition have previously been presented in Frankfurt, Budapest, and New York. Although all the works in this exhibition were newly produced during 1999, the exhibition summarizes themes that have been characteristic of Jacobi's art throughout the 1990s.

The photo series ‘Imagine More’ presents close-ups of cigarette smoke and curling shapes, a motif first introduced in the photo series ‘Imagine’ from 1993. The smoke forms fleeting compositions, referring to the meditative nature of smoking, but can also be seen as a more general invitation to quiet contemplation.

‘The Long Kiss Goodnight (Room 38)’ introduces another of Jacobi's recurring themes: artistic inspiration. This is described in a self-referential spatial composition, where the artist's situation at the moment of the work’s conception is staged with grand cinematic pathos.

In ‘Evening (Room 36)’, a quieter and more desperate emptiness is suggested—a dark bedroom illuminated only by the flickering light of a TV in the adjacent room. Here, inspired reflection turns into a heavier, colder melancholy.

In contrast, the small photo series ‘Real Time Wind’ shows three curtains—wind and strong daylight—opening up to a lighter and more airy atmosphere.

With the exception of ‘Evening (Room 36)’, all the works were produced in New York during the artist’s residency at ISP (International Studio Program), where he represented Denmark in the fall of 1999.

Reviews:

Culture

The Art of Suggestion

Frans Jacobi engages viewers in his spatial stagings of the feeling of absence.

Frans Jacobi (b. 1960) conjures absence in his works. Since 1992, he has created around 40 different "rooms," a type of absence scenography. These are not so much rooms as they are ex-rooms—abandoned spaces. Rooms that still seem to resonate with someone having been there, with something having happened there. The absence in Jacobi's works is an absence that derives its suggestive power from being marked by an immediate preceding presence, which we are only allowed to glimpse.

The Long Kiss Goodnight is the title of one of the rooms Jacobi is currently exhibiting at Stalke Gallery. The sparsely furnished installation consists of a coffee table and a lamp. On the table are a bouquet of flowers whose petals are decoratively scattered across the table and floor, a wine glass, a half-full bottle, a used plate with cutlery, an ashtray, and a cigarette pack. On the floor, in the corner, a small boombox plays music from the film The Long Kiss Goodnight.

The furnishings exude a deliberate shabbiness, as if taken from a cheap Eastern European hotel room—perhaps they were. The room reconstructs the space where Jacobi came up with the idea for the piece. Yet the dark brown carpet and the lamp's tacky faux chandelier character also lend the room a subtle patina of melancholy.

The objects are props from an anonymous space—a transient resting place, a hotel room—but here they are combined with traces of various actions: eating, drinking, smoking. All these elements act as clues pointing toward transience, the fleeting, the things that imperceptibly slip through our fingers. The room becomes a kind of three-dimensional still life of a cinematic chamber drama to which we are denied full access, while being allowed to glimpse its contours.

Immersion
This art of suggestion is something Jacobi masterfully and elegantly wields, as demonstrated by the exhibition's second room, Evening. The dimly lit room contains nothing more than a small, unmade bed, messy and seemingly just vacated. This minimal scenography is lit by the flickering blue light of TV screens, filtered through one wall's floral curtain and an almost-closed venetian blind on another wall. Compared to the other room in the exhibition, this one is steeped in a heavy, almost depressive atmosphere of confinement and stagnation.

Jacobi orchestrates and stages these various emotional states as interiors one can step into and experience physically, engaging with the subtle yet effective manipulations of one's feelings. This is achieved without the use of violent or spectacular effects but rather through a refined seduction.

The rooms invite a type of immersion reminiscent of cinema's imaginary spaces—affective engagement. In contrast to many of Jacobi's earlier rooms, which were more stylized and carried surreal undertones, these are almost social-realist. This shift, however, does not make the rooms any less alluring—quite the opposite.

Cigarette Smoke
Beyond the two rooms, the exhibition also features a series of Jacobi's photographs, including the series Imagine More, which captures cigarette smoke's fleeting formations against a monochrome background. These traces of something dissolving into something else are as beautiful and transient as drifting clouds, yet they carry a bittersweet awareness of impermanence.

In this sense, the photographs are variations on the same theme that also defines Jacobi's larger works: absence and lack. And just as in the photographs, the installations treat reality as a kind of ready-made. External reality finds its way into the gallery space with these works, which also comment on the relationship between art and reality—not questioning whether it is art, but rather thematizing how it is art.

Jacobi's works always pass the ball into the viewer's court. As an audience, you become particularly aware of your own role in the works, as they draw upon your personal reservoir of memories and only thereby become evocative. In other words, the audience brings the fullness that Jacobi's absence scenographies demand, demonstrating how art works—something that, to a large extent, is an art in itself.

By Rune Gade

The Magical Rooms

The feeling of being alone—or that someone is absent (which is roughly the same)—can be evoked by focusing on what people leave behind when they vacate a place. It might be a curtain lifted by the wind, or visible smoke from a smoker who can no longer be seen. Or it could be concretely staged rooms, a scenography of absence, where the only traces of humans are lifeless "things."

Frans Jacobi is a suggestive neorealist who avoids the traditional tools of art to create illusions. He presents objects directly, building rooms where he places objects—remarkably few objects. It might be a coffee table with the scattered remnants of a solitary person's meal and a bouquet of slightly wilted flowers. The depressing sight is illuminated by an ugly lamp and accompanied by the world-weary music from the film The Long Kiss Goodnight (which is also the title of "Room 38"). Or the installation might be a dark room, Evening, which consists only of an unmade bed and flickering light, perhaps from a neighbor's television or the flickering of a street's neon sign.

It might be too strong to call Frans Jacobi a modern, three-dimensional Hammershøi. But his ability to thematize absence, even in multiple media and convincingly, is demonstrated here, where he also draws atmospheric assistance from the aura of Stalke Gallery's basement spaces.

Jacobi's magical "rooms" are not only nourished by their surroundings. They also engage in dialogue with the receptive souls who may step into them, filling their conscious emptiness with moments of fragile wonder.