END OF THE LINE.

By Surpik Angelini

This exhibition of paintings is a meditation on life and death. The artist, Jeff Jennings, known previously for his constructivist abstract paintings and sculptures, has returned to an earlier version of his figurative work. This time, the artist uses the powerful figure of maritime vessels in shipbreaking yards, involving different stages of mutilation, dismantling, deconstruction and ultimate destruction. It is an allegory of death. The return to figuration, after a sustained exploration of abstraction, is rhyzomatic in Jennings’ case. The work combines the evocative effect of open brushstrokes defining the overwhelming scale of the surrounding atmosphere of sea and sky, while the more defined silhouettes of the fragmented ships reveal the Pyranesian complexity of their inner spatiality and structure.

These vessels, dismantled in estranged shipyards far from the world where they originated, are charged with meaning. Traces of the life they carried within exude from every fragment extracted from the whole. Their painful death is heightened by its staged scene of forced exile, in wastelands where humans and objects become interchangeable scrap.

Jennings first witnessed these forsaken landscapes through poignant documentaries such as Manufactured Landscapes and the photographic work by Edward Burtynsky. But only after experiencing the Bangladesh shipbreaking yard first hand did he feel the full impact of the drama unfolding before his eyes. The work that is now collected in this exhibition is a meditation on the objective and subjective “mise en abyme” of the human and physical degradation of the environment. The small paintings, conceived in a 12”x12” square format, frontally focus on each severed ship, its inner structures suggesting phantom buildings re-imagined as silos, cathedrals, barns, skyscrapers, modernist monuments.

Yet for all their multifarious suggestiveness, the overriding sensation in these small works is of great stillness and an aloofness that touches on the metaphysical. These small portraits of monumental vessels stand alone in a timeless, alien atmosphere. We could be looking at them through the eyes of de Chirico or Morandi. The purity of their geometry, their centered focus, invites us to prolongate the duration of our gaze. They almost function as Mandalas, something that is even more evident in the pieces rendered in a circular format. 

The large scale paintings, some as large as 80”x 80,” present us with two aspects of the unfathomable, or what philosopher Edmund Burke called The Sublime. First, we are confronted with the vastness of the abysmal wasteland in which these ships come to shore and, then in other instances, as we get a closer look at the ships, the mysterious labyrinths of their entrails are either evoked or openly revealed.Walter Benjamin once observed how industrial ruins were romanticized in the twentieth century. Still relevant today, we can appreciate this aesthetic in the work of Anselm Kiefer and Bernd and Hilla Becher. Jeff Jennings shares this sensibility, adding to the aesthetic his own personal history. He has witnessed two kinds of catastrophic ruins in two cities he has called home. First, the natural devastation caused by Katrina in New Orleans, where he lived from 1986 to 2007. The other, in the form of man-made ruins seen in Houston’s continuous razing of relatively new structures to make room for more profitable buildings. Both forms allude to Benjamin’s vision of the industrial ruin. It is not surprising after Jennings’ intimate relationship with New Orleans that, as an artist, he found a gripping attraction to Bangladesh with its port city of Chittagong equidistantly located exactly half way around the world from Louisiana. It is a river delta as well, with similar weather and a poverty level that challenges the worst post-Katrina scenario.

Jennings’ exhibition End of the Line can be considered an elegy to remains of civilization embedded in the ruins of human creations. It is a thoughtful reminder in a world that financially thrives in erasing these beautiful monumental creatures. Each painting can be seen as a portrait of a particular vessel, standing for a plethora of rich human experience. Each vessel presents itself as a distinct identity: Constance, Veronique Delmas, Gardenia Ace … all destined to be forgotten, if not for the art that keeps their poetic presence alive.

Surpik  Angelini

Founder and director of Transart Foundation for Contemporary Art and Anthropology.