Jaco Roux

(b. 1962, South Africa)

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In 1984 Jaco Roux completed a BA Fine Arts (Hons) degree from the University of Pretoria. In 1985 he received a HED diploma in education. In 1996 Jaco was chosen to represent South Africa in the Neuchatel Arts Exposition in Switzerland. Jaco then participated in numerous landscape exhibitions in South Africa, UK, Ireland, Croatia and Switzerland. In South Africa, Jaco divides his time between farming Subtropical Crops in Louis Trichardt and painting landscapes of the Limpopo Province.

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In 2004 Jaco acquired property with his own gallery in Rovinj Croatia where he spends his summer months and exhibits his collections at Galleria Menno and has since then included Croatian Landscapes into his repertoire.

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“The deep love and respect he have for the land he selects to convey through his artworks are plain to see for anyone who stands before his work: marks that do not describe as much as evoke; colours that allude to, but do not slavishly replicate the ineffably ungraspable beauty of the open veld. The ‘naturalistic portrayals’ (if one can call them that for, as I have just argued they are more evocations of invocations of both sight and experience) of the beautiful open spaces of nature are severely juxtaposed with fields of raw colour and complex painterly compositions that owe nothing to the visuality of ‘surveying the field’ in a visual sense.

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Rather the ‘abstract’ layering he creates is a reflection of an experiential engagement with the world he inhabits, visits and admires. The balance between these elements creates a dialogue between us, the landscape and indeed the artist himself. For me, Roux is an exceptionally generous artist: how easy it would be to hold the true essence of encountering, feeling, living and breathing in the spaces he paints to himself, merely showing us ‘the view’.

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His masterstroke is to make us feel alongside him, through the conceptual elements that each painting incorporates and thus, giving us the gift of sharing the experiential aspects of landscape alongside him. I can think of very few ‘landscapists’ who do the same. I characterise this as generosity but maybe it is also a gift of imagination and the ability to sense beyond what the eyes alone can take in. For me, Roux is more a conceptualist – perhaps an ‘evocationalist’ – than a ‘landscapist’.” – Andrew Lamprecht