A wily Parisian mannerist with something for everybody (and from several somebodies), Fabert seems to have forsaken pictorial syntax in order to speak several languages at once. The result is visual babble. The tower that Jacques builds contains hunks of representationally drawn human anatomy and art historical debris grouped together by cubistic spacial lacing. His glossing draftsmanship is, nevertheless, superior to his color. Having studied with Fernand Léger and Andre Lhote, Fabert seems to have ignored Leger’s legacy of structural clarity and integration. Instead, his paintings, with their moribund pastel colors, monotonous tactility and motley conceptualization, disclose what an awfully good student of Lhote’s he is.
—Rosalind G. Wholden
