Catalogue Notes
Joseph Yaeger’s paintings carry a jolt of emotional tension compressed within their tightly cropped frames. Working in watercolor on gessoed linen — a combination as unstable as it is visually arresting — he creates images that flicker between memory and media, intimacy and distance. In his 2002 painting Blood, which offers a close-up of finger-licking lips rendered in soft, bleeding washes, the narrative gives way to sensation. The subject may remain elusive, but the surface reveals the story of its own making: pigment lifts and seeps, edges blur, and the image seems to hover in a state of suspended resolve.
While watercolor is often associated with lightness and ease, Yaeger approaches the medium with a sense of opposition. Since departing from conventional paper supports in 2018, he has spent years developing his now-signature gessoed linen surfaces — a base that actively resists the watercolor it receives. “There’s a huge argument between them,” Yaeger has said. “The watercolor does not want to be on the gesso.” To work through this tension, he builds his surfaces gradually, layering white gesso and watercolor over several months. This slow, additive process echoes the way memories form and resurface — accumulated, altered, and occasionally unstable. The resulting surfaces recall the flickering impermanence of film, where presence is always in negotiation.
That cinematic sensibility runs deep. A former film student, Yaeger draws his imagery from a vast personal archive of found material — film stills, news photos, screenshots, and visual fragments from the corners of the internet. He doesn’t invent his subjects so much as recover them. What captures his attention are images that, in his words, “jar, attract, or dislodge.” He catalogs them chronologically, returning later to select those that linger. “It’s a protracted search to better understand myself,” he explains, “playing or putting on roles that might clarify an interior that is… hidden, even from myself.”
From there, Yaeger distills. He crops, edits, and pares the image down. Context recedes. What remains is a distilled fragment — often familiar but difficult to place. “The images appear at first glance immediately recognizable and equally untraceable,” he’s noted, describing the “uncanny déjà vu” he seeks to evoke. Blood, like many of his paintings, offers little in the way of setting or backstory. Instead, it trades in mood, texture, and a kind of emotional temperature. The cropped composition withholds more than it offers. What’s left is less a scene than a trace, something like a memory just beginning to take shape.
Yaeger’s work doesn’t chase resolution. His images hover in states of ambiguity — between figuration and blur, presence and absence, suggestion and specificity. Even in their most vivid passages, they remain deliberately hard to pin down. As Yaeger has put it, “Painting very much can describe what it feels like to get pinched or bite your tongue.” His paintings don’t dramatize events so much as register affects: the charge of something glimpsed, the residue of a fleeting sensation.
Blood, like many of Yaeger’s works, resists finality. It doesn’t aim to be read or decoded; it invites a slower kind of engagement — one built around perception, recognition, and response. The image doesn’t insist. It lingers. And what stays with the viewer may have less to do with what’s depicted than how the painting behaves: sliding between legibility and loss, intimacy and erasure. Yaeger’s work doesn’t offer conclusions so much as openings — spaces where emotion surfaces before meaning can fully arrive.