The Andrea Nuovo Home Gallery is pleased to invite you to the opening of Psychopomp, the first solo exhibition by Patrick Jacobs in Naples. The artist, long known for his installations of imaginative micro worlds and for his aesthetic research of metaphysical value, has in the course of his recent practice undertaken a path of exploration in the name of a re-semanticization of subjects and themes connected to the alteration of living matter and the most primitive human impulses and how they, shaped by the contrast between expressive means, techniques and elements, act by revealing themselves to the limits imposed by physicality. The exhibition, accompanied by the critical text by Bartholomew F. Bland, includes 25 unpublished works among which sculptures, “viscosity” monotypes, dioramas and hand-made wallpapers.

Psychopomp is the term used to describe the spirits that guide souls into the afterlife when they cross the threshold from one realm to another. The psychological desire for security and guidance after death – or towards other stages of transmutation – represents what Jacobs explores as a basic human need. The psychological desire for safety and guidance after death - or towards other stages of transmutation – represents what Jacobs explores as a fundamental human need. Variants of the figure of the psychopomp as spiritual guide are present in different faiths from ancient Greek and Roman (Charon the ferry driver of hell) to religions still practiced (San Michele that accompanies souls to heaven). Although the artist gets inspiration from various traditional threads, his creations emerge as a result of a prolific intertwining of human, animal and vegetal natures.

The woodland scenes of Jacobs’ dioramas are openings towards the worlds of otherness where he gives life not only to a forest or a landscape but to something ghostly, fantastic and dramatic, in a suspended time and in places not found in reality but in the limit of dreams. In the work "Yellow Owl" from the predominantly acid yellow takes shape an owl – for the artist, metaphor decidedly akin to psychopomp – which rests idyllically on a branch in front of a world in bright and warm tones that foretells a next dimension of delights. The presence of this bird of prey also echoes in the series of monotypes in which, even so a shocking material, chromatic and spatial transformation is triggered.

In works such as “Swamp thing (blue)” or “Moss Man” appear blob-ular, chaotic and undisciplined creatures that emanate a maniacal energy barely contained, by the two-dimensional nature, in their support. They are ambivalent beings – rough and soft – but above all pervaded by an almost threatening sexual valence, as if they wanted to unleash the primordial human desire. In their sculptural representation they mutate once again, becoming bronze entities whose physicality appears unexpectedly in the garden of the Home Gallery.

The exhibition project, which arises from the artist's profound stu