2009 MARC DE JONG: PNTNGS3
EXHIBITION IMAGES
De Jong has referred to his creative output as ‘media dreaming’ and ‘culture jamming’. He selects familiar images from both popular culture (a favourite being the epic Star Wars film series) and more ‘ancient’ sources such as photographs and etchings from early newsprint and books. He then ‘reprocesses’ these images onto canvas, using oil, acrylic, and even ‘flock’ in a unique, pixilated dot style of painting that has a tough-edged street quality. Conceptually, de Jong’s paintings ‘stake their oppositional claim … against the short-term values of what he calls “the global media flux of the instant” ’.1
Over the last two decades de Jong has held over 15 solo exhibitions and has been involved in numerous group exhibitions. In 2009 de Jong was a finalist in the Sulman Prize at the Art Gallery of NSW, and in 2008 he was a finalist in the Wynne Prize (also at AGNSW) and in the 2008 Fleurieu Biennale. De Jong's work is held in various collections throughout Australia, including National Gallery of Australia, Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, Monash University and Artbank.
Marc de Jong, also known as ‘marcsta’, one of Melbourne’s most notable illegal street artists, completed a Bachelor of Fine Art at the Victorian College of the Arts. Prior to that, he studied under Howard Arkley while completing an Advanced Certificate of Art and Design at the Prahran College of TAFE.
1. Perez, Ingrid 'Spamocracy', Australian Art Collector, issue 44, April- June 2008, p 129
RLVNT NFRMTN RGRDNG PNTNGS pt.1
According to perceptive position, the visuals hover between abstract and representational engagement. Abstract for when seen nearby, a complex mesh of integrated circuitry predominates, tangling the focal network to supply a territory of myriad interconnected coordinates. Colour rhythms generate a topographical map. A synoptic charter of strange attraction has little marks partnered up as molecular team members, fixed reference points joining extensively pixilated groupings to establish a non-linear grid of basic ingredients meandering inside conglomerate emptiness.
Representational in that seen from further away, say a distance of more than a few metres or so, a photoscopic image coalesces, falling from chance into legibility as synthesized intravidual gestures conform congregational alignment, seemingly random details (co)operating with a gravitational logic of sorts to provide recognizable depiction of some thing or place.
This scaling play uses adaptive optics to acknowledge wholeness as being more than components summation, i.e. the forest for all its trees and creatures, sounds, smells, movement, shadow, undergrowth, decay, etc. The paintings provide a possible forum for this spatial relativity by inviting both an intimacy with their subjective minutiae revealed close at hand, and a cultivation of what could well be a bigger picture with the objective perspective(s) gained when viewed from across a room.
Conceptually, the Pointlessist approach is that of deliberate immersion in the man-machine mixological interface so as to explore and perhaps invigorate our exponential, interpersonal and virulent technological realm in which scattering washes of metadata are constantly (up/down)loading, (up/down)grading, being stored, reset, sieved, forgotten, deleted. This multidimensional uncertainty is addressed by the artwork being an idiomic hub for its collective particles.
They emulate neural pathways, evolving as distilment of transformative energies amid decentralised, distributed systems of a heavily mediated consensus reality; an environment wherein possibility implies existence. ‘Dots’ occasion a democratic infinity of (p)referential viewpoints; an atomised, viral expression whose optical treasure trove of anonymity echoes in fractal league with our surrounds by behaving sequentially en masse via a resonant coding to initiate morphic vibrational stimulation, thus causing the manufacturing process to be perhaps more akin to software programming than regular picture making.
This operational coda is flux filtration device, a pro tem compound lens conducting investigation into a stratum of classical, (post)modern, cosmological, and quantum outlooks by resourcing concerns of migration and variance of elements in space/time, bit streams of web traffic/parking, information commerce, information of light; notions of conspiracy that collapse into ocular containment.