Wrestlers Painting

Contact: art@carldejager.com. I was born and raised in South Africa. After obtaining a Bachelor of Arts in 1996 (majoring in Graphic Design and Art History) I left the country to spend the next two decades living and working as a graphic designer and software developer in England and later Australia. In 2015 I decided to dedicate myself to a career in painting and moved to Barcelona to study at the Barcelona Academy of Art. Since graduating in 2018 I have stayed on at the academy as a teacher and resident artist. Philosophy, psychology and metaphysics have had a great impact on my thinking and provide me with much inspiration. Figurative realism has proven to be a useful tool in expressing some of these ideas. I like to explore our perception of reality. Having lived through the ‘doublethink’ indoctrination of politics and religion in apartheid South Africa, my subsequent disillusionment was profound: At a fundamental level I understand that there is very little that I can ever hope to fully understand. More introspectively, my work also deals with my subjective interpretation of life. Where words fail, symbolism and abstraction are often the only way for me to explore and convey complex feelings and emotions. But painting is also often simply an experiential process for me, a way to lose myself in beauty: the soft pink and gold light of an autumn landscape, the elegance of a line as it follows the curve of a hip, the shock of a bold pattern or the breathtaking subtlety of a muted colour harmony. Time slows down and I sense something profound just below the surface of the mundane, something exquisitely ordered yet irrational and intuitive, and it is in these moments, as an artist, that I feel truly alive.