ÉTUDES SYMPHONIQUES: THE RECENT PAINTING OF JOOST DE JONGE
In his painting, by his own admission,
Joost de Jonge follows a model supposedly extraneous to painting, that of
classical music. Indeed, he has professed this influence, above all others, for
at least the last half-decade, studying and listening to concert music –
whether of the Baroque era, of the Moderns, or of whatever period – not simply
as inspiration, but as formal and coloristic prefiguration. This writer has
identified de Jonge’s impulse as “ekphrastic,” seeking to manifest the form and
content – and above all, the sensation – of music in his very different, but
demonstrably sympathetic, art.
The ekphrastic condition, however, infers a
reliance on specific compositions for such form and content, an attempt to
translate the spiritual as well as structural essence of extant musical works
into painting. De Jonge has certainly done this, and continues to do so. His
work of the last year, however, embraces a wider goal: the expression of
musicality itself in painting.
In this regard, we might be able to say
that de Jonge has that much more fully encompassed another label I have pinned
on him, that of “neo-modernist.” Such a rubric indicates that de Jonge
consciously – you might say ideologically – seeks intellectual and practical
guidance from, and thus positions himself as an inheritor of, the artists of a
hundred years ago who invented abstract art – and, not incidentally, for whom
the example of music provided model and rationale. Such neo-modernism, too, has
been de Jonge’s approach, more and more overtly, since the new century began:
he has come to define himself against post-modernist dissolution by finding
identity in the inheritance – supposedly discredited but still stable – of
modernism. (Of course, such reclamation of abandoned impulse is itself a
post-modernist maneuver, but such is neo-modernism’s participation in the true,
larger post-modernist discourse.)
In fact, many artists working today rely on
musical exemplars; many (certainly the most prominent) of these reliances,
however, manifest as cultural/social citation and performative situation, and
most cite recent and current popular music as their motivation. De Jonge, by
contrast, is responsive to classical music, even in its most experimental
forms, and as an abstract painter finds the reasoning of ekphrasis the logical
means for embodying his preferred sonic art in his preferred optical
discipline.
But, again to emphasize, de Jonge’s current
direction builds on rather than simply recapitulates ekphrasis, emulating
rather than mirroring classical music, an approach even more central to modernist
practice. In particular, de Jonge has been exploring a theme-and-variation method
in his painterly composition, establishing a fixed relationship between key
shapes and manipulating a variety of attendant elements (color, texture, linear
intensity, details of contour, even interior patterning) as if “tuning” a
visual idea. We see this method anticipated throughout the history of
modernism; indeed, Monet’s and Cézanne’s ceaseless examination of given
distinctive subjects established a modernist ethos of investigative redundancy,
an ethos that recurs forcefully in the oeuvres of, among others, Matisse,
Picasso, and Delaunay.
But it is most of all in the work of the
Blaue Reiter painters – in particular, the Russians among them, Kandinsky and
Jawlensky – where we see the theme-and-variation approach formalized,
established as an end in itself and aligned with musical practice. Kandinsky
stands to this day as the most consciously musical of painters, establishing a
direct ekphrastic relationship with composer counterpart Arnold Schoenberg and
defining his first bodies of entirely non-objective work according to musical rubrics
(“compositions” and “improvisations,” as well as the less musically specific
“impressions”). Jawlensky’s landscapes, heads, and non-objective paintings evince
the theme-and-variation musical model less deliberately, but no less obviously.
In his work of the past year, de Jonge has
followed the theme-and-variation form with great deliberation. Not
accidentally, however, the formal examples of Kandinsky and Jawlensky – not
alone, but above all – display their DNA in de Jonge’s recent canvases and
works on paper. These works could
not have been painted by either Russian, of course, betraying as they do de
Jonge’s personal sensibility, one that admits Mondrian, Léger, Schwitters,
Klee, Appel, etc., and his own unique formal and coloristic preferences, not to
mention touch. But they could not have been painted without either Russian,
either.
At this point, Joost de Jonge stands – or
works – somewhere between ekphrasis, a specific practice, and neo-modernism, a
generalized context. The neo-modernist rubric necessarily encompasses all contemporary
ekphrastic work in idiomatic terms; but, as noted, most contemporary visual
artists engaged with music follow formal models that do not identify as
neo-modernist. De Jonge, for one, brings ekphrasis, as practice and as model,
back to its modernist roots.
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