Exhuming the Hatchet
2022
This intimate watercolor on gessoed linen exemplifies Joseph Yaeger's distinctive practice of mining cinematic and photographic imagery to create unsettling, psychologically charged compositions. The close-cropped view of a sunburned figure with a luminous green vessel perched on their back is rendered with Yaeger's characteristic tension between figurative precision and atmospheric dissolution, set against a hazy, indeterminate landscape. The title, *Exhuming the Hatchet*, inverts the familiar idiom of burial and peace, suggesting the retrieval of conflict or concealed violence beneath an ostensibly languid, sun-drenched surface. A compelling example of Yaeger's ability to transform found narratives into enigmatic, slow-burning paintings that reward sustained looking.
- Medium
- Watercolor on gessoed linen
Spotted works by Joseph Yaeger
Artists in conversation
Eric Fischl
American · b. 1948
Fischl creates psychologically charged figurative paintings that mine cinematic and suburban imagery for unsettling emotional tension, closely paralleling Yaeger's approach of loading close cropped figurative scenes with psychological unease and an anxious, indeterminate atmosphere.
Cecily Brown
British · b. 1969
Brown's figurative work occupies a charged space between representational precision and atmospheric dissolution, where bodies and forms emerge from and dissolve into hazy, painterly grounds in ways that mirror Yaeger's tension between clarity and indeterminacy on his gessoed linen support.
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
British · b. 1977
Yiadom-Boakye constructs intimate figurative compositions featuring solitary or sparse figures set against indeterminate, atmospheric backgrounds, sharing Yaeger's commitment to psychological realism and the use of invented or cinematic imagery to evoke mood and psychological complexity.
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