PRESS RELEASE

MIRRORING BEAUTY/IN THE FACE OF EVIL

Opening April 23 and running through May 18, 2002 is an exhibition of recent landscapes and still lifes from southern France by native New Yorker, Rosalyn Jacobs.

A daughter of Holocaust survivors Jacobs defiantly connects to the past exploring her family's personal history and insisting on maintaining a connection to pre-WWII traditions of painting in a post-modern world of art. With this refusal to abandon her legacy both in art and family history Jacobs creates an iconography of continuity.

This iconography of continuity actualizes itself as a celebration of beauty in all its complexity with stirrings of darkness shifting beneath a sunflower field or in a still life's third day. When Jacobs asked her mother how she went on after surviving concentration camp her mother said "I lost everything and everyone but as horrible as things were I took the little bit of love that was left and went on from there." It is this legacy that is at the core of Jacobs work.

Provoked primarily by perception, the dark and light seen in Jacobs work are not a dualistic either/or construct but intermingling realities. Jacobs expresses the subterranean rivers of pleasure and pain that circulate through the ordinary in life, perhaps leaning towards her mothers optimism in the end.

The mounting of landscapes by Jacobs at Synchronicity Fine Arts has become a sort of "Rite of Spring." In addition to the sensuous rendering of Southern France's rolling countryside, work that Ms. Jacobs has come to be known for, we are brought back to the artist's studio for a series of riveting still lifes. Jacobs employs the power and passion of her landscapes in accordance with the spatial concerns of a contemplative still life.

In all cases Jacobs aspires to expose and possess the enigma of a moment in time. In Jacobs' still lifes and landscapes alike, the paint rhythm interweaves light and color gracefully through differing textural movements of opacity and transparency. Brushstrokes belong to the realm of the "abstract" and "real" simultaneously. There is no pigeon-holing Jacobs into either.