Jacob Kassay

Just twenty-nine years old, New York-based artist Jacob Kassay pursues the lineage of paintings as places for light and shadow. With their shimmering silver surfaces, his canvases transform blankness into aura and emptiness into reflection. These paintings have no color, no paint, and no image, but as objects in space, they take on all the lights, shadows, colours, and images of their surroundings. These are paintings about the experience of being in a room with a painting.

Electroplating, a process commonly used to create shiny silver surfaces for jewelry or silverware, involves using electrical current to fix a layer of metallic material onto an object. By painting a canvas with a thin layer of acrylic primer – thus making the surface of the fabric impermeable and able to hold the metallic deposit – and dipping it into a silver-electroplating tank, it emerges with a reflective silver surface. The chemical process singes any parts of the canvas that are left unprimed and exposed to the chemical solution, creating burn marks around the edges of the silver paintings. As Kassay prepares his canvases for plating, he applies the primer in such a way as to create areas of different smoothness, roughness, and density, which insert a certain amount of deliberate composition into his largely chance-based system. Still, not having control over how the chemical process will ultimately determine the formal qualities of his works, he is always surprised by the plated result. Like all good photographers, he knows that what happens in the darkroom is just as important as taking the picture.