Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. When we contemplate the paintings of Dutch artist Jarik Jongman, we cannot help but be confronted with the spectacular collapse of our certainties. His burning modernist villas, abandoned interiors, and empty waiting rooms directly challenge us about the state of our civilization. And let me tell you, the diagnosis is not great.
Jarik Jongman, born in Amsterdam in 1962 and winner of the prestigious Luxembourg Art Prize in 2017, does not merely paint buildings. He dissects our era with a precision that would make even the most stoic analysts pale. A former assistant to Anselm Kiefer in 1995, Jongman draws from a repertoire of images that he photographs himself or finds in flea markets, books, magazines, and on the internet. But do not be mistaken: these diverse sources are only the starting point for a deep reflection on ontology, religion, and history.
What immediately strikes in Jongman’s work is his obsession with modernist architecture. Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, Richard Neutra’s Desert House, these icons of an era when we still believed in progress, reason, and human perfectibility. But under his brush, these symbols of utopia transform into flamboyant ruins, vestiges of a dream that has burned out before our indifferent eyes.
There is something profoundly Kantian in this approach. Emmanuel Kant, the Enlightenment philosopher who exhorted man to dare to use his own intelligence, would undoubtedly recognize in Jongman’s paintings a fundamental questioning of the limits of human reason [1]. For if modernist architecture embodied this blind confidence in the power of rationality to shape a better world, Jongman’s paintings show us the dark side of this ambition.
Take, for example, his work titled “It’s Gonna Be Great, It’s Gonna Be Fantastic” (2017) measuring 180 x 244 cm. This painting depicts the interior of Donald Trump’s penthouse in New York, transformed into a dilapidated and abandoned space. The ironic title echoes the hollow promises of the American president during his first presidential term, perfectly symbolizing what Jongman calls “our post-truth society”. The modernist architecture of the skyscraper, a symbol of progress, is perverted by a neo-Versailles decor of poor taste, illustrating the corruption of the Enlightenment ideals by contemporary narcissism.
This tension between the noble aspirations of modernity and their current perversion runs through all of Jongman’s work. As explained by Julia Beauquel, Doctor of Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art: “The reason for this choice could be the painter’s taste for the aesthetics of these architectural works. But more broadly, they are for him the symbol of a certain spirit that is dear to him: that of modernity” [2]. Jongman reminds us that modernist architecture was driven by a genuine humanist and social project: to create a more open, transparent, and egalitarian society.
But alas, this beautiful project has failed. And Jongman’s painting confronts us with the smoldering debris of this utopia. The flames that devour these modernist edifices are not merely a symbol of transformation, as the artist himself emphasizes. They are also a brutal reminder of the fragility of our intellectual and material constructions. The fire that actually ravaged Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse in Marseille in 2012 takes on a metaphysical dimension under Jongman’s brush.
There is something in this apocalyptic vision that evokes the cinema of David Lynch, whom Jongman cites among his influences. Like in “Lost Highway” or “Mulholland Drive”, the spaces painted by the Dutch artist are imbued with an unsettling strangeness. The rare human figures that appear in his paintings resemble specters, folkloric dancers with blurred faces performing a ritual in an unexpected architectural setting. One thinks of the tortured faces of Francis Bacon’s characters, but also, more sinisterly, of the propaganda images of totalitarian regimes glorifying national traditions.
For it must not be forgotten that modernist architecture had its fiercest detractors in totalitarian regimes. As Jongman himself recalls: “After Joseph Stalin’s rise to power, the Soviet government rejected modernism on the pretext of elitism. The Nazi government of Germany considered modernism narcissistic and absurd, as well as ‘Jewish’ and ‘Negro’. The Nazis exhibited modernist paintings alongside works by the mentally ill in an exhibition titled ‘Degenerate Art’.” This historical awareness adds an additional layer of complexity to Jongman’s work.
The artist himself confides: “In my work, I try to convey a sense of impending catastrophe”. This atmosphere of apocalypse that permeates his paintings can be related to the aesthetic theory of the sublime developed by Edmund Burke and Emmanuel Kant. The sublime is that aesthetic experience that confronts us with something so great, so powerful, that our imagination is overwhelmed. Facing Jongman’s burning villas, we experience that mixture of terror and admiration that characterizes the sublime.
But there is also in this apocalyptic vision an obvious sociological dimension. Lisa Takahashi writes about Jongman’s work: “Devoid of human presence, the painting seems to take a retrospective look at an era of great promises, at a time when it feels as if this promise has long since faded” [3]. This analysis hits the mark. Jongman’s abandoned spaces are the silent witnesses of a civilization in decline, of a societal project that has failed.
When asked about his attraction to abandoned spaces, Jongman responds: “There is a distinct melancholy associated with abandonment, especially when the function of the space is lost beyond all recognition. A new form of beauty is created: by the forces of nature and time, but also by the viewer”. This reflection reveals the deeply philosophical dimension of his work. The artist is interested in how we invest spaces with meaning, and how this meaning can dissolve over time.
This is particularly striking in his series of abandoned waiting rooms. “A waiting room is a place where time, or life, seems suspended. We are temporarily placed in a situation where we cannot act. And we do not have to. It is not expected of us. This offers a moment of contemplation, with temporarily lifted responsibility”. This analysis by the artist echoes the reflections of sociologists like Marc Augé on “non-places”, those spaces of transit characteristic of our supermodernity [4].
But the abandoned waiting room takes on an even deeper existential dimension in Jongman: “We like to think that we make choices in life, decisions made by our free will. But perhaps our sense of control is an illusion. Ultimately, there is the fear, the realization itself, that everything is in vain, that all is in vain. And what if waiting was all we are capable of?” This disillusioned reflection evokes Camus’ absurdity, but also Zygmunt Bauman’s analyses of “liquid modernity”, this contemporary condition where nothing is stable, where everything dissolves in a perpetual flux.
Let us return to the thread of our analysis by looking at the pictorial treatment of these abandoned spaces. Jongman uses a technique that he himself describes as “more aggressive, more brutal” than the one he previously employed. This more violent pictorial approach is perfectly suited to his subject. The impasto, the drips, the rough textures give his paintings a striking physical presence. The viewer does not merely contemplate an image, but is confronted with an object that imposes itself with an almost threatening force.
This materiality of the painting is particularly evident in works like “Once Upon A Time In The West”, created in 2017. This monumental painting (244 x 366 cm) combines oil, acrylic, plaster, and tar on panel. The raw, almost primitive materials contrast with the architectural sophistication of the subject represented. This tension between the brutality of the material and the elegance of modernist forms perfectly translates the collapse of the ideals of modernity under the weight of reality.
In his work “The Judgement” (2020), Jongman addresses another aspect of our contemporaneity: the globalization of the individual. As he explains: “Technological development has made it possible to extend across the globe to present and market oneself. Simultaneously, this has led to a common and stereotyped visual language, as well as a common aspiration to be happy, rich, and carefree, with any form of dissent and discussion rendered harmless because it takes place in cyberspace”. This sociological analysis of our narcissistic and superficial era finds its visual expression in a painting where modernist architecture is merely a backdrop for our theater of the ego.
In this painting, as in the others, the almost total absence of human figures is striking. When they do appear, it is in the form of blurred silhouettes, ghosts haunting these deserted spaces. This dehumanization of places originally designed for humans is an implicit critique of the failure of the modernist project. As the artist emphasizes: “An integral aspect of this process is the meticulous examination of the Other: the continuous mechanism of judgment by which we constantly evaluate ourselves and others to determine whether we/they meet this global standard that we have created, based on narcissism, insecurity, and fear”.
What is particularly interesting in Jongman’s work is how he manages to give a metaphysical dimension to this sociological critique. For beyond the denunciation of our “post-truth” era, his paintings confront us with more fundamental questions about our relationship to time, space, and memory. The burning modernist architecture becomes a contemporary vanity, a memento mori that reminds us of the fragility of all our constructions.
A parallel can be drawn between this vision and that of the philosopher Walter Benjamin, who saw in ruins the visible manifestation of the passage of time, the materialization of history as catastrophe. But where Benjamin retained a certain revolutionary optimism, Jongman seems more disillusioned. His modernist ruins do not carry a promise of redemption; they merely testify to the failure of a civilizational project.
This disenchanted vision is reminiscent of that of certain contemporary filmmakers like Lars von Trier, whose film “Melancholia” also explores the collapse of our civilization in the face of a cosmic catastrophe. The melancholy that permeates Jongman’s canvases has this same cosmic quality, this same metaphysical dimension. It is not merely sadness in the face of a failed architectural project; it is a deeper feeling of existential loss.
Nevertheless, Jongman’s painting is not desperate. There is a form of stoicism in his approach, a lucid acceptance of the contemporary condition. As he himself says about abandoned spaces: “A new form of beauty is created: by the forces of nature and time, but also by the viewer”. This ability to perceive beauty in ruins, in collapse, testifies to a form of resilience.
Perhaps this is where the true strength of Jongman’s work lies: in its ability to transform our anxiety in the face of the collapse of the great narratives of modernity into an aesthetic experience. His paintings do not offer us easy solutions, illusory consolations. They confront us with the raw reality of our contemporary condition, but they do so with such pictorial mastery that this confrontation becomes a cathartic experience.
In contemplating Jarik Jongman’s burning modernist villas, we are not merely spectators of a catastrophe; we participate in a form of contemporary ritual, a funeral ceremony for the lost ideals of modernity. And in this ceremony, there is perhaps the possibility of collective mourning, a lucid acceptance of our condition, the first step towards a possible renewal.
For if the burning modernist architecture symbolizes the failure of a certain civilizational project, it perhaps also opens the way to new forms of inhabiting the world. In their very desolation, Jongman’s abandoned spaces contain the promise of reappropriation, of reinvention. Like architectural testimonies, they invite us to imagine new ways of being in the world, beyond the smoldering ruins of modernity.
Jarik Jongman’s art, ultimately, offers us this rare possibility: to traverse disenchantment without succumbing to cynicism, to look straight at the collapse of our great narratives without giving up on beauty. In a world overwhelmed by media noise, fake news, and the superficiality of social networks, his canvases offer us a space of silence and contemplation. A space where thought can unfold again, where the gaze can linger on the ruins of our civilization and perhaps perceive there the beginnings of a new world.
- Kant, Emmanuel. What is Enlightenment?, 1784, Berlinische Monatsschrift.
- Beauquel, Julia. Exhibition text for the exhibition “Chaos and Uncertainty”, La Pinacothèque, Luxembourg, 2018.
- Takahashi, Lisa. “Jarik Jongman: The Melancholia of Abandoned Buildings”, Jackson’s Art Blog, February 8, 2018.
- Augé, Marc. Non-Places, Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, Le Seuil, 1992.
