Joseph Yaeger’s work feels like it has seeped out of some gloomy, murky, unknowable past, like his paintings have just barely coagulated into reality. It’s all fragmented, hazy, stuck in a fugue-state of lost memory and pixelated nostalgia.
The young London-based American artist paints found imagery and snippets of films with washed-out realism, but all totally removed from context, cropped-in too tight, distorted and twisted. A hand offers you a pill as you walk in – but it’s not some hallucinogenic to help you trip to wonderland, it’s more like a downer, a hit of Xanax to ease you through the rest of the show.
What comes next is a world of woozy, half-remembered snapshots of hands and eyes and faces. Dennis Hopper holds two phones up to his head, a man is reflected in a woman’s sunglasses, a mirror reflects a woman’s face in front of a man’s. It’s Gerhard Richter-like, scratched and faded. The doubling and reflection continue upstairs: a man peers through bifocal glasses, a woman’s eyes are shielded by a huge male hand. Vision is mediated, manipulated, controlled.
And because it’s obvious that at least some of these scenes come from films, though you can never place which ones, you’re left with this incredibly uncomfortable, disconcerting sensation: an unplaceable déja vu, memories you know are yours but you can’t quite unlock, thoughts on the tip of your tongue, never quite tripping off. You recognise what you’re seeing but can’t figure out where from, so you’re left utterly lost. Everything here is eerily familiar, but totally ungraspable.
Yaeger’s aesthetic fits neatly alongside the hazy, close-cropped, pop-cultural figuration of fellow young Londoners Issy Wood and Louise Giovanelli, a generation of downer realists painting foggy, referential, dark, medicated images.
Not all the paintings here are great, but Yaeger is a very good painter. And somewhere in all these screenshots translated into paint, in these endless lenses and mirrors and haze and fog, there is a pretty accurate reflection of modern life.
