Kalashnikovv Gallery
11.06 - 05.07.2022

Ronél De Jager’s solo show at Kalashnikovv spans two seemingly irreconcilable domains – abstraction and decoration. Decoration, in so far as her paintings are pointedly concerned with the bouquet, or floral arrangement, and, as such, informed and honed through domestic design. And yet, her paintings are also abstractions, in so far as they evoke the limits of the seen, or representational. Her paintings mimic the Real yet challenge such a categorisation. This qualification – as much a riposte as it is a fluctuation – is dramatised in the way that De Jager paints. Her resistance to tangible fixities, the opacity which clouds her painterly patina, the fact that what we see is intrinsically blurred, signals a critical departure from the convention of Still Life painting, to which she alludes, yet which she betrays. This is because the canvases as not memento mori or deathly records of the symbolism of things, but dispersed filligreed lingerings of patterns, of forms, whose greater kinship lies with the inscrutability of sight, what we think we see.

De Jager’s blurred filligreed canvases evoke the ornamental, then erase it. Why? What is gained from this deliberate distortion of things? To my mind, it suggests an artwork that is more impressionistic than realistic, the art of someone drawn to miasmas – visualised worlds that quake and tremble in the face of certainty.

Ronél De Jager, Holdy, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Kalashnikovv Gallery.

By deferring to abstraction as a vital aspect or dimension of her creative process, De Jager most clearly reveals her hand – that she is far more enraptured by the effervescence, the liquefaction, or curdling of discrete dimensions. This is also the root focus of Impressionism. In De Jager’s case, she deliberately foregrounds the blurred detail, reduces the setting and the seen, so that we have no consoling vantage point from which to mediate, inhabit, modify ourselves in relation to what we are looking at and experiencing. Instead, we are caught in an amplified rub, all too proximate, and as such unable to second-guess our insights and emotions.

Again, why? Because De Jager enshrines a disconcerting intimacy, because the rub, central to the experience of her canvases, appeal to the inarticulate foundation of feeling.

One can of course see the paintings at a distance too. But what is subsequently magnified remains inscrutable – De Jager’s paintings don’t yearn for some greater clarity, they ask us to live inside of their amorphous nature.

In times of excessive certainty, none other than a hysterical masquerade, De Jager returns us to the tender moments when one hovers between worlds, hesitates, trembles, doubts then yearns. It is for these interconnected and intimate states that she creates. To assign a great significance to paintings which refuse to signify, other than obliquely, is an unscrupulous and oppressive endeavour. Rather, De Jager’s paintings cling more tenderly to breathing fingered on a window pane, inscrutable figurations in a carpet, dilations of forms seen in passing, designs under erasure. Their elegance lies in their inscrutability, in the gentleness with which a mark is fudged, a line tangled, a smoky shape configured. Ronél de Jager tells us that all is well enough within deeply felt uncertainty, in unfolding beauty, in patterns and forms that enshrine an adventure of the heart.

Ronél De Jager, Oh The Drama, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Kalashnikovv Gallery.