Jacob Gooch
Angels A’Destroyin’
Wet Concrete
Film School II
Who and Where
NITE FLIGHTS
Selected Plein Air Work (2024-2026)
Selected Figurative Work (2024-2026)
Animation
Information
Solo Show
Angels A’Destroyin’
Alma Gallery
Angels A’Destroyin’
Alma Gallery
Angels A’Destroyin’ is a series of oil paintings, all referencing moments of violence in film (all films are sourced from films by John Woo for consistency in research). The show explores the genre by abstracting it as much as possible through painting. The figure is distilled as far as it can go, and the bigger the paintings become, the less they reference their film, maintaining only a relationship with the original gesture drawings they derive from. The work references a genealogy of aesthetic aggression and violence in contemporary art. The title “Angels A’Destroyin’” is a reference to apocalyptic themes of total annihilating forces and ecstatic violence, something I believe to be universally sensed in all of us and seldom exercised.
For me as an artist, these paintings are also part performance and an exercise in perception, where in distilling these figures they begin to be something else and grow their own through line, only in the act of creating them over and over. There is a sense of semantic satiation as the figures repeat, and perhaps together they might change their nature for the viewer as well.
This series of paintings mediates a way for the viewer to exercise and participate in a moment of aggression and consider how their own perception and observation can have an eschatological motive.