How to characterise our friend Jules? He was a man of great modesty but of considerable ambition.

He was a man whose work was made with great – even extreme – precision, carefully, no, scrupulously, thought out, each work internally ordered according to preconception and prepared design, each one itself a variation within a serial organisation, which series was itself one of a progression of series. Individual work and series alike were governed by the order of a geometric idea and a determined economy of colour.

But he was in his life outside of art a man whose personality was marked by what I might describe as an untidy edgelessness, a gregarious openness, a personality that in some respects lacked a sharpness of definition, there was a nervousness of presence, a porousness, which came of diffidence and, perhaps, of a great shyness, in company. This is not to say that he didn’t love and enjoy the company of others, indeed he would blossom and become expansive and excited when among friends – and Jules had many friends; he smiled with extraordinary warmth of affection, empathetically laughed with shoulder-shaking abandon at a joke or an irony. He loved a drink; he loved to go out for a meal: he loved to be with those he knew and trusted. But, always, there was a certain reserve, an attractive lack of assertiveness, a certain complex self-consciousness, even, at times, an inner sadness.

I think it probably true – and it is something true of many artists – that Jules was most himself, and most confidently at one with himself – when he was in the studio. I remember him saying in one of the dark days of his dying ‘If only I could spend another day in the studio!’ In fact there was remission and he did spend days more there in his own chosen world, the world of his creative being, the cave of making. And it was there that he had worked so heroically – and happily – for so many years without recognition other than that of a small number of artist friends and even smaller number of critics and dealers. I should pay tribute here to Angus Broadbent, whose recognition of Jules’s gift and specialness, and whose support as a dealer prepared to back his judgement against the prevailing indifference, made an enormous difference to Jules in his last years, brought him happiness, and may at last bring about the recognition his work deserves.

I spoke of the order and predetermination in Jules’s work. But if we believe that ‘the style is the man’ – that what an artist makes is in some respects a function of a unique world-view, a particular vision – then I should remark the quality of surprise and the play of visual ambiguity and paradox that is so profoundly central to his conceptual concerns. For it is here that we see the character of the man we knew – nervous, diffident – finding that precision of expression of which I spoke earlier. For at bottom, and he knew it, Jules was essentially a philosophical artist, dealing with the central problem of philosophy, the problem of knowledge: What is real; and how do we know it? ‘Abstraction,’ he said, ‘should bring another kind of reality.’ And ‘A reflection of the world as it appears is not enough. It is what things could be that matters.’
The dominance of black and white made his use of colour wonderfully surprising, and I think that it is true to say that Jules was in fact a remarkably knowledgeable colourist of great resource and cunning. Colour brought an element of lyricism to the severe counterpoint of black and white, speaking out of the geometry with a suggestive, emotional affect, like the lyrical melody that moves us in the most rigorously formal fugue of Bach. There was a great deal of Jules in the formal discipline of black and white, but there was also a great deal of his sweetness and emotion in those understated elements of colour.

Our friend Jules was a sweet man; and an intelligent and courageous artist.

 

Mel Gooding 1 October 2007