I realized when I saw this show that Jack Mims’ paintings have always intimidated me, and that this time they did not. It was a relief and a pleasure. Mims is an allegorical painter, and his images are extremely literate, personal, and dense. They combine primitive mythology—allegorizing the artist as a shaman—with direct autobiographical detail, including portraits of friends and descriptions of actual incidents. But they also borrow from a vast range of historical art, including references to major and minor European artists and tribal cultures from around the world.
Faced with the paintings, I’ve often wondered just how much I need to know to understand them. There’s that nagging sense that I should know more, and yet most of the references are inaccessible—particularly the personal notations. And although Mims’ paintings are usually accompanied by written texts, both on the canvas and on supplementary drawings, the poetry of the writing is equally allegorical and not really much more explanatory.
Here the writing was almost completely gone from the surface of the paintings, and I found them much more effective. Mims’ paintings are always very beautiful. In that first moment of innocent confrontation, when I see them without knowing much about the iconography, I’m always bowled over by his virtuosity. He’s a master painter, and each work plays very bold and graphic representation against passages of subtle modeling, combining realism with an almost cartoonlike imagery.
In Laocoön Windmill, 1986, features a large windmill in front of which various figures seem to be floating from the force of the wind. A man with severed arms falls gracefully in a pose reminiscent of a pietà, although his face shows an expression of pain. A blue horse outlined in red and white races across the lower half of the painting, with an alligator clinging to its back. A crow grasping a knife in its beak stands by, and two animal skins—a jaguar’s and a dog’s—are stretched across two of the windmill vanes at the top of the canvas. It all builds to a crescendo of chaos in which the diverse images somehow fit together to convey a certain sense of order.
I know from Mims’ previous work that the man with severed arms is a kind of self-portrait, the horse is an alter-ego shaman, and the crow is a muse or messenger from Apollo. The alligator makes reference to when Mims lived in Florida (he now lives in Dallas), and the wind is a symbolic life force that frequently appears in his work. But these disparate elements come together here to create a kind of energy that transcends the specific. Like many of the others in this show, this painting is nothing more or less than a graphic representation of the energy that went into its creation. The drama of the symbols is matched by the richness of the artist’s gestures. There’s an otherworldly glow to the color, and the more than 6-by-8-foot size draws you into the picture’s space. These paintings grab you and don’t let you go. This time I’ve put the intimidation aside and am left satiated, if not entirely secure.
—Susan Freudenheim
