2007 NICK DEVLIN AND MARC DE JONG

EXHIBITION IMAGES

Media Dreaming

Marc De Jong is angry. You wouldn’t think it to meet him. He’s a laid-back dude with a penchant for saying farewell with the term “peace” and a beatific smile. But the world is getting to him; the destruction, the chaos, the carnage, the bickering. It’s there in some of these paintings – a world where car bombs blow up in marketplaces, killing indiscriminately; a world where the land is raped and pillaged with nary a thought for the future.

De Jong responds to this scenario in various ways. Part of it is pure wonderment at human endeavour; from space shuttles to Sci-Fi.

When De Jong renders a portrait of Princess Amidala of Star Wars fame it is done with the passion of a fan. But one also recalls a famous line of another royal in the Star Wars series, the Princess Leia, who when she faces execution by the rogue Governor Tarkin (who aims to take over the universe), states: “The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.” Her statement could refer to some of the other pictures on show here – the more humanity tightens its grip on the environment, the more the environment that sustains us is slipping away.

The oddity, and irony, here is that De Jong, far from his somewhat bleak, almost melancholic monochromatic palette of the past, has discovered colour. Whilst it is largely muted, in De Jong’s oeuvre this is a radical step. At times it is almost celebratory, as in his portrait of Princess Amidala. At others it is deliberately oppressive, as when he depicts a massive truck removing soil from a mine where the deep reddish colours emulate the ochres of the desert. It is when he tackles such subjects that the vigour of De Jong’s practice becomes so extraordinary. I would dare Rio Tinto to acquire this painting – or perhaps they would, simply to keep it out of sight.

This is not to say that De Jong is a political artist per se. But it does reveal an artist of extreme sensitivity. These works may have the cool veneer of postmodern image quotation, the technical savoir-faire of an accomplished scrounger of the Internet, but at their heart these are works of passion and humanity.

De Jong refers to his work as a form of “Media Dreaming.” His subjects are sourced from a range of media – the Internet, television, newspapers and magazines – a fact that he makes clear by highlighting the pixilation of his imagery. This is nature via digital culture, a mediated reality, arguably the only one we have left.

– Ashley Crawford