Ronél De Jager’s solo show at Kalashnikovv spans two seemingly irreconcilable domains – abstraction and decoration – in so far as her paintings are pointedly concerned with the bouquet, or floral arrangement, and, as such, informed and honed through domestic design. And yet, her paintings are also abstractions, in so far as they evoke the limits of the seen, or representational. Her paintings mimic the Real yet challenge such a categorisation. This qualification – as much a riposte as it is a fluctuation – is dramatised in the way that De Jager paints. Her resistance to tangible fixities, the opacity which clouds her painterly patina, the fact that what we see is intrinsically blurred, signals a critical departure from the convention of Still Life painting, to which she alludes, yet which she betrays. This is because he canvases as not memento mori or deathly records of the symbolism of things, but dispersed filligreed lingerings of patterns, of forms, whose greater kinship lies with the inscrutability of sight, what we think we see.
De Jager’s blurred filligreed canvases evoke the ornamental, then erase it. Why? What is gained from this deliberate distortion of things? To my mind, it suggests an artwork that is more impressionistic than realistic, the art of someone drawn to miasmas – visualised worlds that quake and tremble in the face of certainty.
