Lot 322: Ex 7 Zodiacal Light

Jess Collins (1923-2004)
Ex 7 Zodiacal Light
titled 'EX 7 ZODIACAL LIGHT' (upper edge); inscribed 'KINNERSLEY NY' (lower right); signed, titled further inscribed and dated 'Jess, Ex 7 Zodiacal Light 68' (on the reverse)
oil on canvas mounted on board in fabric covered artist frame
37¼ x 28 7/8in. (94.5 x 73.4cm.)
Executed in 1968

Hanover, Kestner-Gesellschaft, R.B. Kitaj: Pictures from an Exhibition , January-February 1970. This exhibition later travelled to Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, February-April 1970.
Buffalo, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Jess: A Grand Collage 1951-1993 , September-October 1993.

Acquired directly from the artist.

VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price and at 17.5% on the buyer's premium.
Ex. 7 Zodiacal Light of 1968, by the revered outsider artist known simply as Jess, represents his unique contribution to landscape painting. Jess (born Jess Collins) graduated from college in 1948 with a degree in chemistry, and worked briefly as an atomic chemist. He quickly abandoned his scientific career after having a vivid dream that the world would come to an end in the 1980s. He then studied art in San Francisco, where he met the poet Robert Duncan in 1951, who became his domestic and creative partner. The two shared pronounced mystical predilections, and cultivated their status as eccentric outsiders in San Francisco.

The present work is part of his Translations series, a group of about three dozen paintings that are faithful copies of a diverse array of personal photos, prints, and media images, built up in heavy layers of colourful impasto. Although his works are sometimes related to Pop art, they are not ironic renditions of sourced images, but lovingly painted. Ex. 7 Zodiacal Light is based on an engraving from G. M. Hopkins's reference book Experimental Science from the late nineteenth century. It depicts a bucolic landscape whose sky is filled with the wondrous effect known as zodiacal light, a cone of light that at times appears in the predawn sky, that is the result of sunlight bouncing off space debris left over from the formation of the planets billions of years ago. Jess paints the scene with the obsessive quality that was one of his hallmarks, with discrete patches of colour that have the purposefully naïve look of a Paint by Number composition. The choice of subject conveys Jesss interest in science, while it also has supernatural overtones in the way he presents the almost hallucinatory pyramid of light. Jess chose a text to accompany each of the Translations paintings; for Ex. 7 Zodiacal Light , he selected a passage from R. T. Rundle Clarks Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt , which is a translation of an ancient Egyptian text about Atum, the High god of the Sun.

In 1968, R. B. Kitaj met Jess when he visited Duncan in San Francisco, and the two artists became close friends. While Jess was still at work on Ex. 7 Zodiacal Light , Kitaj became taken with the painting, and offered to trade it for his series of serigraphs of poets. Created at the height of the psychedelic era, the painting is an outstanding example of Jesss alternative treatment of the sublime landscape.