Fell in love with the wolf

This is the first text about the artist Jakup Auce, about whom we know little or nothing.

Jakup Auce is a virgin territory, an island to build, a land to conquer. This is his first exhibition. “Before” does not belong to us.

He said that he fell in love with the wolf.

The wolf never lets go¹, it is a force of the present, a danger.

We have a sense of urgency, a strong connexion with the earth in its powerful and telluric dimension.

There are a lot of pictures, they collide, they are portraits, masks. In this forest full of faces, he presents the world to us. Idols are dancing, their bodies are made of earth’s crust, of bark and ice. They are images of the Earth, aerial views, a world taken from a distance, grand, imposing, vertiginous. And over those, objects arranged together into frozen and raw expressions.

There is a rebellion. A rebellion for the present and immediacy. A solitary dream, a Counter.

Here comes Michaux who raises his fist:

[…] With some smoke, with a dilution of fog
And the sound of a drumskin,
I will lay out superb and overwhelming fortresses for you,
Fortresses made exclusively of eddies and shakes,

Against which your multimillennial order and your geometry
Will collapse into trifles and bosh and reasonless sandy dust. […]²

Michaux who refused furiously the burden of the past in order to install modernity.
Jakup Auce, as for him, wants to fall in love with the wolf. His pictures have the mad features of warrior masks, and  the hieratic look of the moai³.

Presented on free-standing structures, they are statues. Their production also reveal the artist’s taste for the aesthetics of the Sublime that we find – even more clearly – in a small globe sculpture standing like a fetish, isolated in the space, aside from the wide pictures. Are we witnessing a ritual? A pagan celebration? Gods or demons, we will hardly have any other answer than the presence of these dominating portraits, mystical and ghostly.

Falling in love with the wolf, rebelling, loving danger, are the first words of Jakup Auce.

Marc Geneix

1. « Wolf teeth do not let go of the wolf. It is the sheep flesh which lets go. » Henri Michaux, extract from the poem
« Counter », translation by Richard Ellmann

2. ibid.

3. The moaï are the monumental statues on Easter Island.