Nathalie Obadia is pleased to present Runaway Ground, an exhibition by American artist Jason Saager, his second with the gallery in Paris. Continuing his exploration of landscape, a subject he has been investigating for many years, these new paintings expand upon his pictorial sleight-of-hand.
Roads wind between hills and lead nowhere, hills recede into unknown distances, while clouds settle over the land as readily as they drift across the sky. A calm, even idyllic sense of place coexists with a profound instability. Skies multiply, trees rise unbroken from one to another. The laws of landscape slip into unexpected behavior. The ground is as weightless as air. In these works, the impossible is painted with the same patience and verity as the ordinary, a sense of calm and instability entwined.
Born in 1982, in Mesa, Arizona, Jason Saager left to study with the Chicago Imagists before completing his MFA in New York. His eventual return to the Southwest would have a significant impact on the development of his work. “I grew up,” he notes, “hiking and exploring the Superstition Mountains, the Grand Canyon, Meteor Crater, the White Mountains, and Tonto National Forest. Nature as it was. Now, I live in an artificial habitat filled with lush, flood-irrigated citrus groves, tall palms, Italian cypress, and golf resorts in the middle of a punishing desert. Although my work comes out of a nonlinear approach to art history, Arizona is an ideal place to wonder about vastness, immensity, private utopias, and instability.”
With a deep interest in the genealogy of landscape painting, in particular the early Italian Renaissance and Chinese Shan Shui, Saager’s work translates the manufactured paradise in which he lives into pictures that sit somewhere between devotional painting and manic absurdity: trees taller than mountains, a horizon that doubles on itself, and hills that defy gravity. This excess reveals how easily sunsets, manicured trees and perfect weather win us over seductively.
The exhibition title, Runaway Ground, identifies a difficulty that leads to heightened observation: ground that will not hold still long enough to be surveyed requires the eye to recalculate its position over and again. The landscapes, in Saager’s words, “multiply miraculously within a single image.” Clouds are afforded a special license in these paintings. In some, they cover the land, while in others they stand in for terrain. It would be tempting to say the clouds are what make these paintings strange, but what the clouds do is make the strangeness easier to believe, and that turns out to be one of the sources of the paintings’ wonder.
The spatial shifts in Saager’s images emerge directly from his process. He begins with small drawings, which are developed into oil paintings on large sheets of plastic, which, while still wet and placed on the floor, he presses onto paper under the weight of his body. The monotype process introduces an element of unpredictability: different pressures, paints and experiments in surface
determine what transfers without the result ever being entirely foreseeable.
The imprinted paper is then mounted onto canvas over panel and reworked across several weeks, and sometimes months. Within each painting, some areas preserve the ghostly quality of the initial impression, while others are thick with the chaos of paint. The unpredictable monotype becomes the foundation for an accumulation of gestural marks, scraping, impasto and meticulously detailed passages, all integral to the final work.
Each of Saager’s paintings retains the trace of a long sequence of decisions, planned accidents and revisions that parallel the uncertainty the image itself registers—although an uncertainty that never becomes threatening. Where the loosening of natural laws would ordinarily spell catastrophe, these landscapes offer gardens made for contemplation and flourishing, profoundly desirable but too anomalous for any human story to unfold within them.
Perhaps this is precisely where their strangeness lies: in the possibility of a place whose internal measurements, even as they never fully settle, remain meaningful and inviting.
