Jack Mims at McKinney Avenue Contemporary

The legend of the Black Taj informs Jack Mims's "The Black Maps" series (all works 2001-03). According to that legend, the sultan who built the gorgeously white Taj Mahal as a tomb for his wife constructed a black replica for himself across the river Agra. The sultan used a material so profoundly dark that it rendered the structure invisible to human sight. The Black Taj negates as it completes the gleaming structure it faces. In Mims's painting The Black Taj, blackness at once reveals and devours the image. A languorous naked couple embraces before the temple. What appear to be guardian spirits surround them, and the entire scene is supported on the back of a whale.

Mims completed and dated The Black Taj on Sept. 11,2001. If the concerns of the painting were essentially cosmological in origin--Mims learned of the legend from a book on dark matter by Timothy Ferris--the destruction of the twin towers plunged the artist into thoughts of the blackest nature. Over the next two years he painted four more "Black Maps." Most are 10 by 12 feet, with one slightly larger at 10 by 15 feet. Mires hangs them unstretched from grommets on the wall. They are audaciously conceived and grandly executed. Mims can slather black acrylic onto the surface like tar or use it as a delicate wash. White highlights accentuate the narrative action, and touches of color show the artist moved feverishly across the image. In the course of the series, Mims worked out a cataclysmic vision that places the viewer simultaneously in the headlines of the past three years and in the complex but seldom more comforting worlds of myth and cosmology.

In the painting titled The Black Map, two women with babies strapped to their backs hack at one another with machetes. Mims found his source in a newspaper photo from Rwanda and coupled it with Goya's image of two men fighting in the mud. For observers, Mims provides a photojournalist and the figure from Vermeer's The Geographer. One may convey the horror of the situation, and the other will give us what? The greater pattern behind it all? The larger view?

In The Dream Clock (A Brief Appearance by the Invisible Man), a light beaming from a mosque provides two severed hands with the cords they use to rip open a mountain. Text appears in most of the paintings, and here the inscriptions state, "The universe knew we were coming" and "We are spellbound." Fiery pinwheels dot the landscape, a naked man is bound to a St. Catherine's Wheel and, as in all of Mims's extravagant visions, the sky is falling down. Mims, who hasn't had a gallery exhibition in 20 years, has always been an artist who likes to tear the world apart. Destruction is creation in these paintings, and the viewer both suffers and exalts in the consequences.--Charles Dee Mitchell

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