I almost passed over them. Page 152, New York magazine, the images within and amalgamation of Jackie Saccoccio's wall to wall 15' painting. What seemed mostly spray, blurred subway car graffiti, became a shape of movement, and then movements themselves, scenes and cultures freeze-framed in their 21st Century. They are somewhat Syriana montage, Balcomb Greene ("Champs de Mars", "Thunder Over the Sea", "Gertrude", "The Island" and Greene's women), or Robert Motherwell's Spanish Elegies. And in the wee spaces: some stilled-breath like Stieglitz saw, Pollock peeled open to the brain for pictures inside, a filmography of confusion, love, war, perfection, imperfection, restlessness, the post-post-post modern eternity; shadow of body, ghost, [K]lansm'n, breast; a city's trance dance at the peak of its inability to turn back.
Here's how New York magazine's Jerry Saltz put it: "located somewhere between a flickering film still, a weather system, and an ammonia-filled primal swamp. Angled sheens of color and foggy white transparencies, echoing dripped latticeworks and vertical pillars of brawny painting, provide structure and organize it architectonically and symphonically, with repeating motiffs, perceivable progressions, and. . . you go figure out the rest."
Guernica, Picasso. This sort of thing. I don't know Saccoccio's work beyond this. But I trust the one interaction, as I would hope a reader would trust a page, a passage, a word.
And I think, after having almost passed it by--returning to find what is found there, what human beings suffer and die from the lack of each day/ decade/ century (you were on to it, William Carlos Williams, doctor that you were--), that these still-blurs are what can center us again, unite us, reveal the common bond--by lust or lack, by devastation or deed, by myth and memory/ memorial. Through our friendships or through false foes: an inkling, inkwell, wellness through it all--finally. Celebration. A wet celebration, surmounting.
