When Marcel Duchamp famously denounced “retinal art” it was an action which would not only mark the arrival of the notion of the conceptual as a work of art in itself, but also launched in some minds a rigid bipartite relationship between painting and the rest of the visual arts.

At around the same time Lovis Corinth gleefully described himself as being a “paint pig”. This statement seems to confirm the matter by providing an equal and opposite reaction to Duchamp's position: the painter absorbed in swinish physicality whilst the rest float off to a superior cloud. The stage is set for the now tedious endgame of the death and periodic resurrection of painting. I must add that neither of these artists themselves fell for this simplistic device. But there remains a suspicion around the practice of painting that it just might be all a bit too decadent, sensual even. This peculiar 19th century anxiety can be surprisingly productive, as for example the painterly subversions of the painterly by the Art & Language group bear adequate witness, and I believe, coming from a different angle, the work of Dirk Jan Jager, which thrives on the ambiguities of a painter's practice.

Jager's work avoids both camps; his painting is not conceptual art. It is lush, virtuoso and lacking a punch line with which to reveal the concept, but far too plainly stated to be simply self-indulgent wallowing in the pleasures of paint. To return for a second to Corinth and Duchamp, there are other possible arrangements. I think of the truffle-hunting pigs of France and Italy, their fine-tuned sense of smell excited by delicate and to humans undetectable odors of an underground fungi.

These 'Sumos' and these 'Babies', like truffles even as they are rooted out into the light, remain things of mass, matter and darkness. They are whole and complete, are present but invisible, made available however to those senses that do not lend themselves so readily to conceptual articulation, the fruit of the fruitful nose of the Jager pig, the paint pig.

Simon Ferdinando