Juggler’s Debt

Description

Juggler’s Debt is from a series of Jake Berthot’s paintings that demonstrate how frames change the way we see. Prior to this project, he typically made paintings featuring gestural expanses of color, in a clear debt to the work of Mark Rothko (1903–1970). Here he carefully separates one area from another, with an attention to simple geometric forms fundamental to Minimalist art of the 1960s and 1970s. The basic composition of this piece is two interlocking rectangles, the smaller of which is enframed by colored bands. While the intersecting rectangles may seem at first glance to be two joined canvases, this work is one shaped canvas. By exploiting the push-pull effects of warm and cool colors, Berthot creates the illusion of the smaller rectangle hanging on the larger rectangle.
(A. Dixon, 20th Century Gallery installation, June 1999)
"The concept of the window and the wall is one which Berthot explored from almost the beginning of his painting career. His early works of the late Sixties and early Seventies focus on a series of rectangular voids, beautifully stained with luminous veils of rich color washes and framed by heavily painted, dense elements which forcefully stabilize the painted interior atmospheres. Eventually, the interior window element broke loose from its confined placement in the Notched Series and its variants of the early Seventies where the interior window space now is bordered by adjacent framing wings or extensions. By manipulating the length, width and color of these partial framing elements, Berthot was able to achieve a wide range of perspectival perceptions."
(Chapman, p. 60.)