The Brooklyn Rail

In the last eight years, Marcus Jahmal’s work has charmed many across the world, gaining the critical attention of global galleries and collectors. The Allentown Art Museum in Pennsylvania is the first public institution to recognize his work, with a modest solo exhibition titled Higher Animals, which focuses on the relationship between man and animal through his recognizable dreamscape compositions and bold, simple color palette.

The theme of the Spanish bull made a recurring appearance in Jahmal’s last show at Anton Kern Gallery, Interiors (2023), and we encounter it again here in Revenge (2023). In this painting, we see three horizontal bands of solid flat color (baby blue, ochre, and green) from top to bottom dividing the space, perhaps an allusion to sky, land, and green fields, a compositional abstraction referencing early modern miniatures as well as twentieth-century painters such as Henri Matisse. A diagonal band of vivacious red brushstrokes hints at the cape in flight, used to tango with the bull. The animal’s body reads as an elongated abstract black mound, with three daggers spilling blood. On the same plane are its head, horns, haunch, and the wispy end of its tail sticking out, as well as the flattened almond eye, nostrils, and tongue sticking upright, where the whole bundle closely alludes to the bull’s virility in its last breath. There is a clear reference to Pablo Picasso’s fascination with the Spanish bullfight and the flattened-out forms that evolved from Analytic Cubism, especially in his brief association with Surrealism. A skeleton dressed in festive green, gold, and fuchsia wears the performative garb of the toreador, recalling the moving work by Édouard Manet, The Dead Toreador (1864). Artistry has a fine line between life and death, familiar to the finest artists who have toiled with its delicate equilibrium between survival and their work. Here is a painting asking questions of itself, a mirror held up close, testing endurance while entering a critical passage in its next phase in evolution.

Jahmal’s chosen animals are mostly in wilderness and caught in instinctive action, such as an eagle preying on a snake in Eagle Has Landed (2024). Each painting contains a solitary animal—these are not in groups or part of a larger community. When repetitions occur, such as the eagle swooping down to snatch a snake or standing watch on a tree, it reads as the same eagle at various moments. These legible divisions of space could be images representative of a fluid time sequence, perhaps similar to repeated characters in comic strips. A fascination with time is felt throughout Jahmal’s work and made explicit in Bird Cage and Time (2021) where we see a clock on the wall, while a single chair and its dramatic shadow become the main props in this vertical diptych, the interior space delineated by divisions of exaggerated red and green. The clock is placed so high it could be a full moon. It is a poetic work, perhaps the most mysterious of the group, and though it is devoid of animals, the dynamic nature of the shadow reveals the possibility of an animist spirit held within this chair.

A single brushstroke, color per character, and protagonist add to the eeriness, the danger, the loneliness felt in this body of work. In Prayer Rugs (2024), the animal is hunted, butterflied, splayed against two carpets, one maroon with blue abstract diamond motifs and another bright red with circumventing tassels. The perspective of outlined floorboards contrasts with the flat aerial viewpoint of the teal floor—an element exaggerated in scale, comedic, and often present in his previous work. These could be references to the wooden floors of Philip Guston. The animal forms are found wet-on-wet, in one color, often mixed with white, in a similar painterly fashion to Guston’s post-1970s image-based paintings made with a trembling, searching, sticky brush from which satirical heads, legs, eyes, and cars came together to haunt and point fingers at us.

Bather (les nabis) (2023) has a woman lying in a bathtub with the olive skin of her breasts and languid, boneless leg showing as she smokes a cigarette, her expression unphased by the presence of a black bull, a voyeur. She is flanked by a candelabrum on the yellow wall and a burning candle on the red circular rug, shaped like an arena and bearing stark resemblance to Francis Bacon’s 1969 three-part bullfight painting. When Jahmal’s paintings involve several elements—the interior, the flat divisions of space, a human and animal presence combined, and symbolic, deliberately positioned objects—we enter a psychological state echoing the gravitas and complexity of his influences. Present are primal urges, animal-human confrontation, and the thin line between power and survival, refined and savage, lust and desire. 

As an artist who is self-taught, Jahmal has fearlessly delved deep into the history of the great European painting of the twentieth century for inspiration. By absorbing the formal language of these artists without any detectable sense of irony or rebellion, his invented dream spaces and narratives live within the language of Cubism and Surrealism and are therefore both familiar and unfamiliar to lovers of painting. When Jahmal turns the lens specifically to African American protagonists and portraits, one work of which is now in the collection of the Allentown Art Museum, Living Off the Land (2021), and on view on the ground floor, the accounts he probes become all the more prescient in today’s work. We see additional intimate examples of these being explored in the colored pencil and watercolor drawings on view in a vitrine. This work paves a path for Jahmal where the voices of his influences remain in the past, while he is in the present poised with endless inquiries, growing through form and matter, his curiosity expanded.