Looking over my notes on Jacqueline de Jong’s exhibition “La petite mort,” I found myself confused for a moment. Surely there were more paintings than the eight listed in the checklist. I recounted, and yes, there really were only eight; it’s just that there was so much more going on here than that number of paintings should possibly be able to contain. It’s what made the show seem so bountiful, so dense with incident, so “clamorous with event and feeling,” as Michael Bracewell writes about Sneaky Guardian, 2024, in the catalogue. Humor, anguish, grotesquerie, a kind of fraught lyricism—all combine in a brutal but colorful hubbub. Not only a surfeit of imagery but a surfeit of possible interpretations bubble up. This artist was a committed maximalist.
Sadly, “La petite mort” turned out to be de Jong’s last exhibition in her lifetime; the Dutch painter passed away at the age of eighty-five in June, about a month after the show opened. Four paintings from 1963 to 1965, juxtaposed with four from 2022 to 2024, demonstrated in the most vivid possible way the essential unity of her oeuvre. Yes, some superficial differences exist: The older paintings are smaller and more thickly painted. But across a gap of sixty years, the compositional and thematic connections were striking. Only the earliest of the paintings, Untitled, 1963, tries to split the difference between abstraction and the figure, with features such as an eye or a paw seeming to rise up unbidden from the vigorous manipulation of pigmented matter. Yet by the next year, with Accident banale, 1964, the figurative impulse has come to the fore, with a bent toward the childlike and irrational that clearly shows de Jong’s debt to the Cobra artists, a generation older. Autostop Suicide, 1965, presents a strange creature with four legs—each clothed and shod differently—and a head resembling some animal skull bleached by the sun; in the background, a bicycle or other wheeled vehicle has hit a tree.
Materially, de Jong’s touch became lighter over time—more ambiguous, too, as she gave herself more space to work with. Bucha, Ukraine II, 2022, is named after the city near Kyiv where hundreds of civilians were massacred shortly after the Russian invasion. Are the painting’s many intertwined figures corpses? Mourners? Ghosts? All of the above? The work is not a painting of protest in the tradition of Guernica—though the quasi-Cubist inflection of space means the spirit of Picasso was looking over de Jong’s shoulder as she painted it—but is more like a metaphysical reflection on the ubiquity of death. A central motif shared by the show’s three most recent paintings (Painters’ Thoughts, 2023–24; Polar Bear . . . ?, 2024; and Sneaky Guardian) is what appears to be a tray, limned in grisaille, filled with tiny figures, like dolls, but also evoking souls gathered in some otherworldly limbo. They are surrounded in all three works by larger figures that are somehow not quite or no longer human, and all sorts of animals—frogs, turtles, less securely identifiable mammalian creatures—that appear more than merely bestial. These spooky visions remind me of James Ensor, but where the Belgian artist showed repulsion at the mad spectacle of the world’s violence, de Jong evinces a deep compassion.
