2008 MARC DE JONG: PNTNGS 2

EXHIBITION IMAGES

The Things

A fluoro-lit convenience store, rows of chocolate bars, a screaming man in a balaclava. A country scene, a tree, a road, grass, sky. Princess Leia from Star Wars, the robot C3PO’s arm, a grid of blue laser-beams. Yellow mining trucks in a vast pit. Two cheetahs, their muzzles stained, poised over the savaged carcass of a zebra. The sun, radiant power, aureoled with rays and tentacles of flame. It’s all about distance. Or perhaps about finding the right distance. Or about not being able to find the right distance. The further you get from objects, the less clear they appear to be. They can blend with their surroundings, or take on altogether illusory aspects. Their shapes can morph and distort on you. Not that getting closer to things helps. The closer you get, the less clear they appear to be. Weird details emerge, forms mutate. Sometimes you can’t even find an adequate distance at all, or the object has no stable or substantial form to seize. Menelaus could barely hang onto Proteus; Isaac Newton nearly went blind staring at the sun with his naked eyes. Appearance itself appears as deception; or, worse, it appears that there’s not even a reality to be deceived about behind the endless slew. You start to worry about the interferences introduced by the media that convey objects to your sight or touch: the dust and shadows of dawn, the colour-bias of your eyes, or the heavy darkening air. You’re in a field of warring media, each with its own determinations and powers, possibly malign. So malign, in fact, that they transform distance into a demented distancelessness, accelerating the variety, mutability and intensity of images, escalating their powers of terror. Thrust outside their own nature, the images of our mediatised world, streaming in from the unlivable expanse of interstellar space or the oppressive depths of the sea, the great artificial mining pits of the remote desert or the tracks of the African savannahs, from generic branded convenience stores or from Hollywood science-fiction, become terroristic. The devastation of nature for the purposes of pure profit; hapless hostages, face down, trembling on the dirty tiled floor, at the mercy of screaming small-time drug-addled crims in balaclavas after a couple of bucks and a handful of candy-bars; cheetahs feasting on the ribs of a fresh kill; faceless men in suits with screens and mobiles. The scintilla of the alchemists, tiny sparks of nature’s light, are transmogrified to unfixable intensities of a pixelated universe, abstract samples composing and decomposing every image. Through painting, one of the most archaic of the visual arts, with its heavy, slow demands for painstaking training in materials and history, Marc de Jong stops and seizes such images in their contemporaneity. Pretending to simulate the gridded lights of screens and lenses, surveillance cameras, documentary footage, nature shows, scientific research, entertainment fantasies and financial bulletins, he shows you that you see that you don’t see and yet still presume to recognise what’s not there: the featureless topography of faces, impossible worlds, the tentacles of the flare and flocking of sun.
Justin Clemens