JACQUELINE DE JONG Pas de deux: Cyclodrama

Château Shatto is delighted to announce Jacqueline de Jong’s exhibition, Pas de deux: Cyclodrama. The exhibition marks the gallery’s third solo presentation of De Jong’s work, and its first to focus solely on works which employ unprimed sailcloth as their substrate. This is the first presentation in a two-part exhibition – the second of which will present De Jong’s work in concert with new multimedia sculptures by Özgür Kar. For over six decades, Jacqueline de Jong has advanced a terraneous oeuvre which finds its greatest concentration in painting. Her practice makes contact with several touchstones of the post-war avant-garde, while also forging its own counter narrative, one distinctly shaped by her intellectual vigor, aesthetic acuity and irreverent spirit. In the early 1990s, De Jong produced a body of work consisting of unstretched paintings on found sailcloth. Deeply haptic and embodied, these works acknowledge a modality wherein myth concedes to material via unfurling the picture planes across readymade, billowing substrates. The anthropomorphic figures present in these works are bound within flecks of paint, at varying registers of legibility. They hum and fissure, the marks which constitute them perturbed in ruptured striation. The surfaces they are laid across breach from under; swaths of raw sailcloth puncture the paint, provoking an epidermal fragmentation of the images which populate them. They are both animated and atrophied by their formal constitution, assenting towards life in death and back again.

Large tracts of material are left uninhabited in these works. Dense images are held fast within raw fields, scenes which De Jong conceived of as “three-dimensional events” in both pictorial and structural order. The illusory conceits of painting are honed towards the incessant demands of materialism, giving way to invocations of the metaphysical which beckon equally to the milieus of industry and culture which stage them. Cycloramas flank, encircle and ensnare. They are a pictorial spine of dramaturgy, a depot of phantasmic projection. Across her oeuvre, De Jong has mobilized the picture plane as an auditorium of human conditions – one scored through the entanglements of violence, eros and humor – and allowed scenes of discursive interiority to copulate with observations of a vertiginous, exterior world. Her tableau vivants level the banal, sacred and profane into vicious cycles. Pas de deux continues sequentially from this presentation with a two-person exhibition of drawings by De Jong and newly-realized works by Özgür Kar, opening April 29.