ESSAY EN
of human consciousness, the drifting of the neomodernist’s dilemma, every bit as important as the echo from the paintings themselves. What I find interesting about de Jonge’s work is how difficult it is to talk about individual paintings apart from the whole in terms other than the purely formal or academic. While the parts are utterly significant in relation to the whole, the formal language of the past is inadequate, whether decoded from an American or European point of view. I am inclined to borrow McLuhan’s term, “pattern recognition,” or the filmmaker Stan Brakhage’s elusive metaphor, “eyewash.” These terms are virtually interchangeable to the extent that they arrive at the same depot. Both terms consider the whole as the extension of parts. Each of de Jonge’s paintings contributes to a pixelated pattern that moves toward a conceptual picture, even as the larger picture culminates as an expressive form. Personally, I find these obsolete English terms harrowing, if not dissuasive, in relation to de Jonge’s paintings. On such occasions – critical or rational – the terms simply do not provide proper access to his 029