Daniel Jacoby at Crisis

Artist: Daniel Jacoby

Exhibition title: Nehemias

Venue: Crisis, Lima, Peru

Date: March 30 – May 28, 2019

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Crisis, Lima

[Lima, April 2019].- Crisis presents the first solo show in Lima of the artist and filmmaker Daniel Jacoby (Lima, 1985). After winning the Ammodo Tiger Short Film Award at the Rotterdam Film Festival (2018) with Mountain Plain Mountain, he presents his next work: “Nehemías” (2019), shot in Cocachimba, a small town in the Peruvian Amazon region, located in front to the imposing waterfall of Gocta.

Jacoby’s work is composed of fragmented and abstract narratives that navigate between dystopian realities, eccentric characters and ambiguous concepts. His initial artistic production was marked by the systematization and obsession to order the world in a particular way, evidencing the influence of Catalan conceptual art in his work. Through time, his career has been leaving more room for the unforeseen and narrative processes have been gaining prominence. The media he uses are diverse, from drawing, photography, video and text to installation and performance.

The show presented by Jacoby in Crisis: “Nehemías”, is a three-step project, three different levels of elaboration on an idea by Daniel Jacoby that start from a trip. During his time at Gocta Lab, an artistic residency program in Cocachimba, Amazonas, Daniel met Christian, a character whose narrations shape the portrait of a self-exiled professional in the mountains of the Peruvian forest. Christian is a native of the country’s capital who escapes from urban life to live in contact with other people in another medium. Living between two worlds —the one he left behind and the one in he is discovering— makes him reflect on Peruvian idiosyncrasies. With this story, Daniel produced “Nehemías”, a short film that was selected for the Rotterdam Film Festival of 2019, a festival in which the artist has already been awarded in 2018.

The video is illustrated in part with fragments of paintings and drawings by Henry Ledgard, a prolific amateur artist who became friends with Daniel in Lima. Ledgard is an archetypal “outsider” of the art world: a rich character who has had little access to the contemporary art market, partly because of institutional precariousness and partly because of the decision not to pursue a commercial art career. The parallel between Christian and Henry contrasts with Daniel, who rather represents the paradigm of the “insider” artist, with a very successful young career in Europe.

Daniel exploits this contradiction in his interaction with both characters. Thus, in a second step, he builds a series of models inspired by Henry’s work, theoretically designed to house his works, which are exhibited in simple reproductions in the same exhibition room.

Finally, as a last level, a group of drawings from a series titled “Camouflage for a place in which you’ve never been” is shown, inspired by the landscapes and topographies of the Amazon region visited by Daniel. The drawings, precious for their formal achievements, acquire a poetic dimension of struggle against alienation and the search for self-knowledge when they are framed in this group of parallel stories.

Jacoby graduated in fine arts at the University of Barcelona and continued his education at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. His work has been exhibited in important artistic institutions such as the Joan Miró Foundation, the EYE Film Institute, Kunsthal Chalottenborg, the Tokyo Palace, the Luxembourg Casino and the 11th Cuenca Biennial in Ecuador.

Crisis was founded in 2017, since then exhibits young and mid-career artists. It has participated in important international fairs such as ArteBA in Buenos Aires, Artissima in Turin and Arco in Madrid. It is considered one of the most promising galleries among new emerging spaces in Latin America.