1 OCT 2019 - 31 JAN 2020
Ronel de Jager’s work, which shifts between painting, sculpture and installation, deals with concepts of the fleeting, with environmental concerns, and with the notion of deep time. She examines our understanding of time, often by slowing down images culled from her own photographs and videography.
Through an abiding interest in translating photographic and video imagery into ambiguous, suggestive paint marks, de Jager explores liminal states. Blurry paintings imply movement, as if to explore a kind of spatial liminality: unclear landscapes suggest rapid movement.
The disturbance created by this is unsettling, as the details of the landscape resist our grasp. In the place of a full understanding of the situations shown, the viewer is often left with a mere sensation, an intense yet transient impression of the scenes de Jager explores. This transience is to be detected, too, in her working process: de Jager speaks of the need to keep shifting her practice and evolving her interests.
So, interestingly, transience is the constant; change the leitmotif, both conceptually and formally.
The artist says, “I’m continuously fascinated with time on a grand scale, through ideas of evolution of the world aroundus, geological time and the antiquity of the earth. But I also want these histories to speak of a contemporary moment and show the response from the earth to our presence.”
De Jager has presented two major solo exhibitions at South African galleries; the second of these, ‘Broeigrond’, won the KANNA award for best exhibition at the KKNK arts festival. De Jager has also held a two-person show with artist Mandy Coppes-Martin and has been represented in numerous curated shows. Her works are included in a significant number of private collections, locally and internationally, as well as in the corporate art collections of First Rand Limited, Hollard, Rand Merchant Rank, Sasol, Telkom, Spier Arts Trust, Nando’s International and the permanent collection of the South African National Library.
De Jager has worked full-time from her studio in Parkview, Johannesburg, she has recently
returned from maternity leave and joined the Bag Factory Artists’ Studios for a four month residency concluding inJanuary 2020.
