Joseph Yaeger - Time Weft
Beautiful works, beautifully made. There’s no denying just how skilful these paintings are. If you know anything about paint then you’ll be astounded to learn these are not oil on canvas but watercolour on gessoed linen. So thickly applied that the painting appears to sit atop the linen like frosting on a cake, occasionally spilling over the side to create a bonus mini drippy abstract. The layering of gesso also adds textures and depth you wouldn’t normally see in a watercolour. For the technical appreciation, you could get lost in these for hours. I was surprised, however, that I found them visually less interesting.
I was initially drawn in by the close cropped, stylised angles. Eyes are often hidden or intentionally obscured within the scene itself. And as a consequence, the emotions. It’s never quite clear what’s going on nor what you should feel but maybe that’s the point. Yaeger has said “the feeling of it, the arrangement, the subject, the relation of subjects within the image, will sort of jar me, attract me, dislodge me.” Sometimes an interesting angle is just an interesting angle, but I was hungry for more.
As I walked through room after room I had a growing sense of familiarity, that maybe I had seen some of them before. It’s entirely possible that I had, even though these are all new, because the artist works from found fragments of film and photography. They’re snippets from someone else’s story, but imagery loses some of its power and agency when displayed anonymously and out of context. Intentionally obtuse titles only serve to further remove them from the source. They’re exquisitely rendered in an almost photorealistic way. I wanted to love them — and suspect many will — but knowing the back story made the entire exhibit feel like an overly elaborate set of mood boards.
Would I have reacted differently to any single one of these in isolation? Maybe. Maybe they’d wield more power on their own to evoke an emotion, like a carefully chosen movie poster on a dorm room wall. But the thing about movie posters is the designer is almost always anonymous, quietly working behind the scenes to communicate the intention of someone else’s vision. In a way, the Time Weft works are not much different, leaving all of us with the artist as enigma.
At The Perimeter (@theperimeterlondon) until 18 Feb.
Free — but booking is essential.