The author needs to be make a confession. There is currently a Jason Jägel painting sitting above his parent’s dining table. The work, a painting on paper, came from a show at FIFTY24SF Gallery in San Francisco in 2010, where Jägel was emerging as one of the Bay’s leading painters and designers. Working with the sounds of Madlib, MF Doom, Jagel’s visual work read like a kind of music on canvas—layered, rhythmic, and improvisational. His use of collage, bold marks, and recurring motifs created visual beats and syncopations that mirrored musical phrasing, while textured surfaces and juxtapositions evoked the dynamics of composition and production. Jägel’s father was famous for his composition of the John Coltrane Olé Coltrane cover artwork, so the music visualization was in his blood.
But his newest work, the work featured in his newest solo show, A Creature Having A Dream About Himself, on view at Harman Projects, as well as work over the last few years, feel more direct, personal, therapeutic. This work isn’t so much about music but of Jägel’s own self, his own life, his own history and family. The music-referencing gestures have often been pared back in favor of intimate marks, private iconography, and emotionally charged palettes; surfaces feel confessional rather than performative. Even when formal echoes of rhythm or sampling remain, they’re subordinated to narrative fragments, memory traces, and artifacts of self—making the work feel like visual diary entries rather than overt responses to sound.
In A Creature Having a Dream About Himself the work reads like a memory, a vulnerability, and the suturing of private narrative. Remnants of rhythm and collage will always persist, but are repurposed as echoes of inner life rather than performance. This feels like a revival of the Bay Area artist. —Evan Pricco
