“I really like when a painting is in a hovering state when you can see the past and present, but there could also be an imagined future, like maybe a flower is still blossoming with a promise of wilt.”
Within the confines of Untitled’s canvas lives Ernst Yohji Jaeger’s quiet, hermetic world, one in which a sparkling sky dapples a lone, windswept figure with kaleidoscopic shadows. Set in realms neither totally anachronistic nor purely imaginative, Jaeger’s fantasyscapes reconcile magic and mundanity, not only recasting the gamut of art historical iconography but also culling from manga, tarot, and video games to generate dreamlike spaces. Here, Jaeger’s androgynous protagonist appears in solitude—as his subjects often do—and exists introverted, enclosed, and completely engrossed in his own world. With works housed in prestigious international institutional collects ions, including Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris; Museo Jumex, Mexico City; and Fondation Galeries Lafayette, Paris, among others, Jaeger is jointly represented by Galerie CrèveCoeur, Paris and Croy Nielson, Vienna.
Born in Frankfurt in 1990, Jaeger today lives and works in Vienna. Growing up, he spent his summers with his grandfather in Sapporo, Japan and avidly consumed anime and video games. Vestiges of the influence and inspiration these graphics and illustrations provided him can be detected in his practice: each canvas offers the sense of spawning into a nostalgic yet foreign world, governed not by the laws of nature but by the infinite possibilities of special effects. A fluorescent, supernaturally verdant sky reigns overhead, and dozens of suns recede into the horizon, despite the image’s ambiguous state of night and day. Titles of recent solo exhibitions—Quince Moon, Lunatique—suggest Jaeger’s fascination with dusk and the alternative existences nightfall makes possible. Threading the whole of Jaeger’s practice is the sense that submitting oneself to an art form can birth another world entirely, not unlike the absorptive, audiovisual quality of a videogame or anime. “Throughout Jaeger’s images,” Lou Ellingson observes, “everything is somehow dimmed, subdued. Certain scenes possess the subtle horror of a Miljenko Stančić interior, such as one portrait of a manga-inspired character whose eyes and mouth are eerily absent, having perhaps slipped off into the emerald swaths of the canvas as the figure stares, catatonic, at a too-close screen. We’re left wondering what they see.” (Lou Ellingson, “Ernst Yohji Jaeger,” Artforum, 13 April 2022 (online))
“My work is broadly inspired by these visual worlds, the universally abstract, almost manga-like appearance of my characters being a case in point. Like Sarah Moon, I’m always on the lookout for the unexpected.”
Slipping from contemporary life toward the beguiling, t.mes less realm of Jaeger’s invention, Untitled synthesizes a host of artistic influences to suspend, warp, and reconfigure t.mes and space altogether, rendering the world in technicolor. In his figures we might identify the sublime solitude of a Caspar David Friedrich or the self-contained silence of a Johannes Vermeer, but Jaeger engenders a far more fantastical, ineffable kind of contemplation: “We all crave meaning. Somet.mes s, when we find it, Jaeger suggests, it’s in the most unlikely places—ones that are secret, invisible, and impossible to explain.” (Zoë Lescaze, “Ernst Yohji Jaeger,” Artforum, July 2020 (online))
