Ronél de Jager is an award-winning South African visual artist. Born in Johannesburg (1985), she has lived and worked in the city for much of her life.

De Jager's work shifts between painting, sculpture and installation. She deals with concepts of time, environmental concerns and with personal narratives as microcosms of broader social issues.

In De Jager’s oeuvre, transience is the constant, change the leitmotif, both conceptually and formally. Her works demonstrate the continuous transformation to which every form is subjected, and reflect on the eternal processes of becoming and of passing away. In this, she resonates with philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel: “By ‘nature’, we mean the endless connection of things, the uninterrupted production and negation of forms, the flowing unity of occurrence that is expressed in the continuity of temporal and spatial existence. Matter, every kind of material, is constantly in a process of transformation.”

De Jager says, “I’m continuously fascinated with time on a grand scale, through ideas of evolution of the world around us, geological time and the antiquity of the earth. But I also want these histories to speak of a contemporary moment and show the response from the earth to our presence.”

In her paintings, De Jager’s abiding interest in translating photographic and video imagery into ambiguous, suggestive paint marks enables her to explore liminal states. Blurry paintings imply movement, as if to explore a kind of spatial liminality: unclear landscapes suggest rapid movement. The disturbance created by this is unsettling, as the details of the landscape resist our grasp. In the place of a full understanding, the viewer is left with a mere sensation, an intense yet transient impression of the scenes De Jager explores.

A similar transience is to be detected in her working process: De Jager continually shifts her practice and evolves her interests. Her forays into the 3-dimensional have moved her practice into creating environments for her work, as seen in her 2017 exhibition ‘Broeigrond: Fertile Ground for Golden Regrets’.

This installation, which secured her the KANNA Award for the best exhibition at the KKNK Arts Festival of that year, delved into concepts of existence, evolution and life’s fragility. Using electroplating to grow quasi-organic shapes onto Karoo flora, De Jager showed individual sculptures, as specimens, in hand-blown glass vessels. Their fragility heightened by their suspension in mid-air, the works spoke of ecological concerns; along with the overwhelmingly red paintings that accompanied them, the installation had a sense of urgency in speaking about our species’ impact on our environment.

Additionally, she has participated in numerous curated group shows. Recent collaborative projects includes a glass beaded work 'All that Glitters... is Glass' (2022) in collaboration with Cape Town based 'Qaqambile Bead Studio'. In 2019 she has collaborated with Eswatini based 'Ngwenya Glass' on her 'Citizen of Glass' sculpture project. Collective exhibitions include ‘MYOPIA’ with Mandy Coppes-Martin, and ‘Sacred & Profane’, both in 2017. She has been a regular finalist in National Art Competitions; ABSA L’Atelier (2008, 2013 and 2015), Sasol New Signatures (in 2008, 2010 and 2014) and the Thami Mnyele Fine Arts Awards (in 2011 to 2016). De Jager is also a recipient of the MTN Foundation Award (2003). Her work has been presented at the Turbine Art Fair (in 2013 to 2021), Cape Town Art Fair in 2015 and more recently with Kalashnikovv Gallery in 2022.

In January 2020, De Jager concluded a four-month residency at Bag Factory Artist’s Studios in Newtown, Johannesburg.

Her works are included in a significant number of public and private collections, locally and abroad, including ABSA, First Rand Limited, Hollard SA & Australia, Rand Merchant Rank, Sasol, Telkom, Spier Arts Trust, Nando’s International and the permanent collection of the South African National Library. 

Permanent installations of her 'Citizen of Glass' sculpture series have been commissioned by First Rand Limited, (housed at Merchant Place, Sandton) and Hollard (housed at The Pines, Parktown, Johannesburg). She has also completed public commissions for Nando’s UK and Edgars & VMLYR for their 2020 winter campaign.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Ronél de Jager’s most recent works play on the idea of ‘Vanitas’, a term used to group many of the 17th/18th century Dutch Old Master still-life paintings.

De Jager’s paintings explore the conventional ways plants are  presented in and around typical middle-class South African homes – house plants, flower hedges, vertical gardens and decorative flower bouquets. As the idyll of middle-class South Africa begins to falter, and homes become increasingly buttressed small fortresses within an uncertain cityscape, the process of surrounding ourselves with plants seems to be about creating a surrogate for lived experience outside of our gates. Building up miniature forests in and around our homes suggests a desperate attempt to retain our connection to nature, as fear of crime and danger renders many near-agoraphobic.

De Jager’s explorations of this theme have her characteristic uneasiness, twinned with an ineffable beauty, both products of her particular handling of paint. Many of the references for this body of work come from modern ceremonial flower arrangements, mostly wedding bouquets. 

The artist says, “I hadn’t realized the wider significance of these floral motifs until the recent lockdowns. During these periods, the wedding industry became largely stagnant; this in turn caused me to consider the relationships which the lockdowns affected; many relationships have ‘unravelled’ under the confined domestic circumstances.”

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Using a modern digitising method, which manipulates the image to seemingly “drip” off the surface, De Jager painstakingly imitates and translates this process from reference to canvas. The image is at once abstract and recognisable. The result is a series of works which illustrate impermanence, and become reminders of our mortality and mutability.

In a reworking of the ‘vanitas’ concept for our contemporary moment, the works ask not so much when we will die, but rather how long our privilege will extend.

ART FAIRS