“It was written I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice”
Executed in 2023, Loyalty to the Nightmare Chosen is a mesmerising example of Joseph Yaeger’s singular approach to painting. Attuned to the vagaries of contemporary cultural memory, Yaeger’s oeuvre can be characterised by his critical approach to the fetishisation of the image and its free circulation in capitalist economies. Surrealist in its mystifying dreamlike quality, in the present work Yaeger paints a coiling snake perilously held by a manicured hand at the opening of a metal canister. Devoid of any contextual markers, the artist masterfully builds a composition as intriguing as it is unsettling. Yaeger offers a direct reference to Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness through the painting’s title, in which the loyalty of Conrad’s protagonist’s “to the nightmare of [his] choice” reflects a moral ambiguity akin to the snake’s symbolism in Western visual culture. Skilfully capturing a moment suspended at the crux of an action, Yaeger provides no resolution to the image; whether the snake is being removed or placed into the canister remains unclear to the viewer. As Yaeger himself has described: “very seldom do I paint a picture that just stands on its own” (the artist quoted in Will Hine, “Joseph Yaeger in the Studio,” Ocula, 2022, online). Drawing inspiration from multifarious sources, Loyalty to the Nightmare Chosen is at once immediately recognisable and equally untraceable, allowing the artist to build a composition of sustained heightened intensity.
The snake has long been a symbol of duality – knowledge and danger, rebirth and seduction – and in Yaeger’s composition it becomes a vessel of psychological complexity. Loyalty to the Nightmare Chosen recalls the link between snake and evil in Genesis, though the present work is not biblical nor a straightforward allegory. Rather, it presents a contemporary confrontation with ambivalence, control, and desire. The intimacy of the figure’s grip suggests a willful entanglement, a chosen closeness to the very thing that threatens.
“I think there is a kind of method acting involved when I paint. I probably do manipulate my own face and try to get into what emotional state the people in the paintings are experiencing and heighten it as much as possible to get that overture, good-cry feeling, which is indistinguishable from happiness or sadness”
To prepare for a painting, Yaeger spends several months compiling possible reference images in his constantly evolving archive, each chosen with the criteria that they captivate him on a visceral, subconscious level. These are often stills taken from a film, youtubes home videos, or family memorabilia. Upon selecting a single reference image, Yaeger begins to paint in his distinctive material pairing of watercolour on gesso-primed linen, completing his canvas within days. Building the painted surface with layers of acrylic gesso and watercolour, Loyalty to the Nightmare Chosen emerges from Yaeger’s repeated process of addition and removal. Yaeger’s gesso support begins dark, until he scrapes or pockmarks the gesso with water, or the hind end of a brush. Only then does he apply and ease away pigment to find the highlights. Subsequently constructing a richly textured surface, the present work is punctuated with constant undulations and edges, allowing pigment to settle in the crevices. Revealing a deft handling of light and shadow, recalling the chiaroscuro of Renaissance masters, Yaeger’s Loyalty to the Nightmare Chosen depicts a scene dramatically illuminated in the foreground, recalling the stylised lighting of cinema.
Middle: Evelyn de Morgan, The Angel with the Serpent, 1870-75.
Right: Caravaggio, Madonna and Child with Saint Anne (Dei Palafrenieri), 1605-06. Galleria Borghese, Rome.
“There’s a huge argument between them—the watercolour does not want to be on the gesso, it will bead to begin with and it’s extremely removable, so you spray it with water and you’re essentially restarting the painting. It has to be, at least in the very first stages of it, done in one go. Or else you’re fucked.”
While previously painting on paper which he would then append to canvas as support, when Yaeger’s paper supply dwindled while studying at the Royal College of Art, he decided to paint directly onto the gessoed surface. Finding that his watercolours immediately beaded upon meeting the gesso, in a relationship he describes as “an argument between materials with different temporalities,” Yaeger discovered a fortuitous material partnership that allowed him to capture “the fleetingness of film and video on still, antique media” (Travis Diehl, “Pure Emotional Blackmail: Joseph Yaeger,” Mousse, 2022, online). Encapsulating an atmosphere and ephemerality that Yaeger found unable to achieve with oil paint or with watercolour on paper, this discovery was a serendipitous necessity, allowing him to align his theoretical ambitions with material choice.
Courtesy Studio Luc Tuymans, Antwerp, and David Zwirner
Initially studying film before turning to painting, Yaeger draws heavily from moving image. Citing Luc Tuymans as a rare painterly influence, Yaeger has also acknowledged he holds no interest in pursuing Tuymans’ exhausted method of painting a specific film still. Instead, Yaeger paints invented scenes and characters as he is “not interested in anything that exists in someone’s head already” (Ibid.). Constructed from found imagery, Loyalty to the Nightmare Chosen diverges from the realm of explicitly pre-existing imagery. Yaeger instead amalgamates a host of references that calls to various segments of our familiar visual lexicon to create images both familiar and foreign. Within our mediated imagery, Yaeger describes painting sensuality – crafting atmospheres of intimacy as desire – to reanimate that which has been presumed obsolete. To this end, the artist has named writer W. G. Sebald as direct influence. Like Sebald, who resurrected 19th-century prose sentence, Yaeger reinvigorates depictions of intimacy to subsequently expands his own contemporary bounds.
As with much of Yaeger’s work, Loyalty to the Nightmare Chosen indirectly addresses the process of communing with interiority – specifically his own. While also a writer, at one point completely foreswearing his painting practice, Yaeger recognises in painting an ability to speak to the complexity of the human interior in ways which language, no matter how eloquently arranged, can never achieve. The artist’s oeuvre can therefore be understood as a visual reflection of his preoccupation with understanding painting’s relationship to the mediated image, particularly in how we respond to image fragments divorced from their larger contexts. With a strong appreciation for the history of painting, Yaeger’s influence span from the likes of Alberti’s window to contemporary film culture – bearing a surrealist tilt that equally recalls the visual identity of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. In Loyalty to the Nightmare Chosen, Yaeger orchestrates a moment of suspended tension – an image untethered from its origin yet laden with meaning, and where the act of looking is as much an encounter with the unknown as it is with the familiar.
