Paul de Jong

My practice consists of paintings and drawings, which contain a constantly growing vocabulary of images. This vocabulary consists of objects and perceptions from my daily surroundings, particularly things that carry a certain comedic banality. In the process of painting I transform these mundane objects into separate beings that carry a strange relation to the human body. My work has a strong relation to language. For example, a small single image to me is like a word, whereas a larger painting feels more like a sentence. Like words, my images seem clearly defined, but open up an unstable field of significance and ambiguity. With the vocabulary in my paintings, I research the complex relation between the human perception and its surroundings.