Argentinian artist Diego Jacobson burst onto the art scene in the early years of the millennium with Abstract Expressionist paintings that explore the territory mapped by Pollock, Gorky and de Kooning — remarkable given that Jacobson, wholly self-taught, barely knew of Pollock, let alone Joan Mitchell, Hans Hoffman, or Yves Klein. The critical distinctions between color field and action painting, and the ironic, deconstructive spirit of the postmodern art world into which he launched his work, never impact Jacobson's art-making. His aim, instead, is to "co-operate with the paint" in order to create works that communicate through emotion.

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Consider Inner Peace, a small canvas vibrating with gradated yellows from 2005. Jacobson's impasto technique — the trace of the palette knife left as scratches, fingerprints, drips and tube smears — builds a dense, layered surface. A central triangle, part wedge, part tornado, descends from the top of the canvas, radiating a prismatic light that calms the explosion of yellow and lifts the lighter hues toward the surface. As in much of his mature work, sustained looking resolves the gestural brushwork into faces — a perceptual imperative as old as art history itself.

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To understand Jacobson's contribution, it helps to step back. For decades the art world favored a postmodern aesthetic that dismantled painting piece by piece, one in which words like "beauty," "emotion" and "spirit" were treated with suspicion. Jacobson's timing, in this sense, was impeccable. He began to make art in 1999, at 35, after successfully building his own clothing manufacturing firm in Puerto Rico. One day he happened upon a catalogue of Paul McCartney's paintings. "I thought, 'I can do that,' so I started painting."

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A self-made man in more ways than one, Jacobson grew up in a family who emigrated from Argentina, where he was born, to the US when he and his twin sister were almost two — first Queens, then Brooklyn, then Long Island — before the family moved to Puerto Rico when Jacobson was 14. He built a manufacturing practice that eventually extended over three countries, then stepped back from the business in 2009 to devote himself wholly to art. Both his business and his painting, he says, involved intense "on-the-job training."

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Jacobson doesn't work from a plan; he begins with "a selection of colors based on energetics — based on what I feel," then follows the mandate of intuition and trust. "The willingness to be detached from the work and not to get the ego involved in it... to me is key. It allows the magic to happen." Like Pollock, he has "no idea" where a painting is going until it's done, often not recognizing what he's made until he turns the canvas around, sometimes days or months later.

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This trust in the process is a feature of "performatism," a term coined by critic Raoul Eshelman to describe artists who display "metaphysical optimism" — who pursue transcendence rather than irony, and who are grateful to explore what it means to be human. One of Jacobson's watershed 2009 paintings declares, in stenciled masking-tape lettering, Everything Is Perfect. And yet Jacobson has every reason to reject such optimism: in 1976, at the age of twelve, he was in a wheelchair because of Dystonia.

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Dystonia is a neurological movement disorder whose symptoms usually appear in childhood; muscles contract involuntarily, and at its most severe it can make ordinary activities like walking impossible. Jacobson's condition worsened until, at 13, he underwent a now-discontinued and risky treatment: cryosurgery, in which a probe cooled and froze the brain cells causing his involuntary movements while he remained conscious and gave feedback. The procedure took over three hours. When he "woke up," the symptoms on his right side were gone, though his left side still spasms and he walks with a limp. "I opened my eyes for the first time in a long time—a tear came out of my eye."

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Today, Jacobson is primarily right-handed with a tendency toward ambidexterity — before the surgery he wrote left-handed, and he still switches the brush to his left hand when his right tires. That handedness shows up in his canvases, where visual movement tends to run from left to right, toward his dominant side.

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Jacobson came to his spiritual beliefs relatively late, after attending a 1993 Insight workshop in Mendoza, Argentina, at his aunt's urging. In 1999 he completed a Master's Degree in Practical Spirituality from the Peace Theological Seminary. What had changed, he says, wasn't his style but his willingness to stop judging the work: "The main lessons I got [from my spiritual work] are two. One is 'Everything is perfect.' And two: don't judge it.... I never know what I'm going to paint when I start.... In the process of doing it, I'm free—I don't judge it."

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The refusal to judge is the crux of Jacobson's artistic process — the same exhilaration of "metaphysical optimism" that runs through his canvases runs through his account of making them. Courage is always an ingredient in art production, but it is of special note here, given that such forthright expression of spiritual belief remains the exception, not the rule, among contemporary artists.