JACO ROUX

Jaco Roux was born in South Africa on 1 July 1962. In 1984 he completed a BA Fine Arts (Hons) degree from the University of Pretoria. In 1985 he received a HED diploma in education.

In 1996 Jaco was chosen to represent South Africa in the Neuchatel Arts Exposition in Switzerland.

Jaco has participated in numerous landscape exhibitions in South Africa, UK, Ireland, Croatia and Switzerland.

COLLECTIONS

South African Embassies in Bern & Geneve - Switzerland. 
Merchant Bank Johannesburg – South Africa. 
Lowveld Steel Johannesburg – South Africa. 
Croation Embassy – Pretoria – South Africa.

At present Jaco divides his time between farming Subtropical Crops in Louis Trichardt – Republic of South Africa and painting landscapes of the Limpopo Province.

In 2004 Jaco acquired property with his own gallery in Rovinj Croatia were he spends his summer months and exhibits his collections at Galleria Menno since then he has included Croatian Landscapes into his repertoire.

RECENT EXHIBITIONS

- Christopher Moller Art Gallery, Cape Town, Solo – “My Limpopo” Oct 2013 
- Cape Town Art Fair - 2014 
- Cape Town Art Fair – 2015 
- Christopher Moller Art Galery, Cape Town, Solo – “Satara” 2015

PUBLICATIONS

1. Jaco Roux – My Limpopo, 2013 
Christopher Moller Art Gallery 
2. Art South Africa, Volume 12, Issue 02, December 2013, Ashraf Jamal 
3. Jaco Roux, Satara, 2015 
Christopher Moller Art Gallery 
Ashraf Jamal

“I had a farm in Africa …[where] the views were immensely wide. Everything that you saw made for greatness and freedom, and unequally nobility … you woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be”. So begins Isak Dinesen’s 1937 novel Out of Africa. If I conclude this essay with Dinesen’s opening words it is because they tell us something true about the ease that can come after so much human restlessness … Here I am, where I ought to be.

Jaco Roux is also a farmer of subtropical plants in Limpopo. His world, therefore, is also largely shaped by that very emotion which Dinesen conjures. His paintings, fixed upon a distant horizon, a great sky, and a rich scrubland between, is one which, I imagine, he has moved through in his dreams, stumbled upon daily in his walks, caught askance, lingered upon, supped and drunk through the infinite portals of his lone being.

Always, however, it is the greater view beyond that has compelled him, a view, caught at a distance, which curiously, he has chosen to subtract in the paintings’ foreground.

Recalling J.M. Coetzee’s description of the picturesque, in Roux’s paintings we find no ‘dark coulisse on one side shadowing the foreground’, no desire to position the viewer at the fore or middle ground, the better to ensure that perfect fusion of the viewer and the world perceived. And so, in splitting the view, resisting the moment so typical in the picturesque neoclassical tradition of allowing the one who sees a fullness of vision that could make them whole, Roux has chosen to withdraw both himself and the viewer from a full immersion in the world he sees. If this is so, I’d venture to say that it is because, being no Romantic, possessing no sense of wholly belongings to or possessing the world he sees, Roux seeks to remind us of our provisional place on this earth.

He is no master of all surveys, no latter-day colonial adventurer in search of some misbegotten mirror of himself, but a creature at one with his partial sense of self - caught at some remove. If Roux might say, after Dinesen, ‘here I am, ‘where I ought to be’, this is not a matter of fate or destiny but a momentary contract. The artist’s paintings confide this humility.” 
Ashraf Jamal