About Jack

In art as in living, each generation struggles against preceding ones, making a place for itself in the long chain of being. Each person having within a desire to make a self visible and clear — manifest to itself and to others. New people born out of old people, new art out of old, new worlds on and on.

Early in his career, Jack Brusca freed himself from conventional devices of illusionistic representation. Insisting upon impossible physicalities and placing his images in an undefined space, he concentrated his attention upon the art of painting itself. He developed an extraordinary facility with the airbrush, with which he rendered forms appearing three-dimensional and machine-crafted. In his earliest paintings, metallic bands, spheres, and coils float effortlessly upon a flat, monochrome surface of undifferentiated expanse or within a space that has no vanishing point. Everything present is seen. Yet in the confrontation between impossible densities and locations. Objects see at once moving and stable. And when more than one things is seen to occupy the same space at the same time, it not only seems possible but natural. 

Upon closer inspection, we come to suspect that what we are seeing takes place in some sort of theatrical space; with light coming from several sources at once everything seems presented at greatest advantage, dramatically poised, unreachable. Quiet, airless, the space appears to extend into the plane just in front of the canvas and to recede quite deeply to the monochrome backdrop.

Often there is a sense of things having been caught in motion, a simultaneity of events, or an interplay of the same form in several renderings. As if in  multiple exposure, the numeral 5 is seen behind, passing through, in front of two bands. Or in SEVEN (1970), the numeral seems to be emerging from between two metallic enclosures, or is it caught in a trap? Transparent densities in superimposition appear as enigmatic emblems or a reality—a very articulate determination of forms—somehow closed to us. 

In TRIANGLE of 1969, Brusca symbolically tears asunder the wall blocking vision which has appeared in all his canvases up to this point and the beyond is exposed as continuous an expanse as the wall itself, as if the canvas were a scrim upon which the objects were projected in holographic presence. Flaps which open outward casting shadows on the wall are obviously too large to have come from the aperture. Meticulously painted, they seem realistic as do the rails (yardsticks?) emerging from the opening in the canvas—except that contradictions forbid us to read it so neatly. The arrangement is disquieting as it seems real and impossible at once. 

During this first important period of his work, a number of which were exhibited at the Galeria Bonino in 1969, Brusca was overwhelmed with the premonitory stirrings of so many ideas that he used the most straightforward means to execute them. It was a time of great experimentation—both in subject matter (the metallic forms, numerals, letters) and in structural formulation—which was nevertheless bounded by certain rules of order and self-containment. For example, all the pictures remained within a monochrome field except for two large polyptychs, the most ambitious of which is ALPHABET in twenty-eight panels out of Plexi-glas, each an abstract formulation of symbols, Brusca rationalized his arrangement of the alphabet into an array of seven squares by four squares.

The second important period of his work, shown at the Galeria Bonino in 1970, continued Brusca’s preoccupation with his private world of illusionistic painting. He sought to extend the space of it farther in front of the canvas by lighting his paintings with automatic rheostats programed to move through cycles of darkness and light. The slow ebb and flow of gallery lighting augmented the painted light sources and created an eerie, theatrical effect of breathy movement expanding the images off the plane of canvas and into the room. His most complicated work, TRIUMPH OF DREAMS, governed by sixteen light sources, provided a physical situation so complex that it did not seem to repeat itself in a way once could anticipate. The painted images themselves were less held by the limits of the canvas and often seemed to nudge against the edges of it or to flat off it on one side or another.

Titles of Brusca’s most recent work (WHISPER THEM A TRILOGY, BILLIONS OF MILES FROM HERE—MILLIONS OF MILES FROM WHERE I LIVE), contrast with previously cool, uninflected identifications and give the first hint of a more relaxed posture. For the first time, he seems to have drawn aside the curtain shielding the private domain of his thoughts and emotions, permitting others a more intimate view of his involvement with the inherent mystery of images and things. The recent work does not appear to be simply a reflection of either ideas or things but rather each painting brings a new thing into a world of things, fusing real and imagined into a hermetic poetic revelation which no explanation of causality of meaning can satisfy.

A quality which appears again and again is a capacity for wonder at ordinary things—the hills in HOME, the room of MOM’S PLACE, the THREE—in which Brusca is always seeing the familiar for the first time and the extraordinary in the familiar. His homage to the English eccentric artist Stanley Spencer (STANLEY’S PLACE) is particularly interesting in the way it juxtaposes earlier geometrical realism with recent, more painterly concerns. Combining Brusca’s own romantic vision with the simple grandeur of Renaissance perspective drawn from one of Spencer’s compositions, the painting conveys a sense of the solitude of things more strikingly than ever before. Barns, tower, the metallic banner unfurling from its vanishing point, leap out from the picture—each declaring itself, proclaiming its separate importance. In this marriage of disparate entities, this chorus of voices where earlier one voice had spoken, Brusca has perhaps found a more direct and personal way of speaking for himself.