Continuing through June 6, 2026
Jason Jägel presents himself as the author of texts — not on the page but on canvases made of images, color, and language. His works manifest an improvisational surrender to what emerges from his brush. Jägel suggests another way to approach his work as well: he can be regarded as a failed comix artist. His youthful ambition was to write traditional panel-by-panel comix, until he realized that he could not be satisfied with such a linear approach. His paintings refuse to abide by narrative logic. Past, present, future, never-was and never-will-be are all presented simultaneously taking place all over the canvas. One’s imagination can assemble the parts as it may. Somehow the conscious mind has stepped aside for a few minutes in the work of Jägel, a literary collagist of a painter.
Jägel also describes his oeuvre as being not abstract but rather abstract presenting, in that close readings will reveal underlying imagery. For example, a work such as “The Diamond Cat” (2024) initially comes across as an expressionistic field of oranges and yellows with a dark diagonal streak from bottom left to the middle right. It turns out to be a depiction of two men sitting on a couch with a white cat at their feet. This ties Jägel’s practice to the Bay Area tradition of figurative abstraction; but rather than taking an art historical approach his ambitions are diaristic, narrative, and biographical. Because Jägel is the father of two young women, his paintings are frequently populated by images of female protagonists. As in comic books and the work of Bay Area artists like William Wiley and Robert Arneson, words are essential elements. The fractured bits of language that appear are sourced from Jagel’s extensive reading, in things heard online, but most of all from music and lyrics, which are central to both his art and life.
Jägel is an expert on non-mainstream areas of both contemporary and historical jazz and hip hop. His father, also a painter, was well known for doing the cover art for historic albums by John Coltrane and Ornette Colman. Jägel himself is well-regarded for his covers for and work about the late musician MF Doom, who combined underground rap with a persona based on a character from Marvel comics.
Titled “A Creature Having a Dream about Himself,” Jägel’s exhibition is inspired by a drawing that the artist made — and titled — at the age of three and a half. He opens the show with a small 2026 gouache on paper in which he revisits that childhood phrase from the remove of some fifty years. “Senescence” (2026) refers to the effects of aging. The image depicts two pairs of lovers warily eying each other from opposite banks of a river, a boundary representing the timespan of our lives. Jägel now looks back on his past seeing it as only a dream about himself.
The bulk of the exhibition consists of small gouaches on paper that elaborate on the experiences of various characters who stand in for Jägel, his family and his influences. He refers to these as “blotter paintings” because they start out literally as tabletop blotters. Over a period of weeks or months enough practice strokes and marks accumulate on them for the artist to pin them up vertically and develop them as images that feed off the unplanned nature of the blotters. One mixed-media gouache titled “Beauty Marks” (2026) begins in the upper left with random marks, doodles and snatches of phrases (“I say it that way one day”) that congeal into a head and body. A second even more abstract figure is visible to the right. Luscious opaque brown and green colors separate the two, and a snarling, horned figure strolls toward the right edge of the canvas. That simple stroll down the street reads as a parade of threats, hostility, danger and one’s own fears and projections.
Three adjacent paintings interact with cheerful bulbous shapes painted on one wall. It’s an unusually successful use of installation to extend the efficacy of the canvases beyond their edges. Without having planned it, Jägel manages to place the canvases so that their divisions are subtly extended by the colors on the wall. “Green Satin” (2024) presents as abstract until the pink streaks on the right click into place as limbs, teeth, lips and an eye that all float amid random jabs of color that resolve as parts of at least three faces. It’s an effect akin to Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s Mannerist-era paintings of fruits and vegetables arranged to compose coherent portraits. A curved line on the wall, done in two shades of pale green, divides the painting precisely one third of the way from its left edge.
Jägel’s wit, introspection, and curiosity are all to be seen in “Home Made of Bricks” (2026). It has a black arc at its bottom right that fits exactly into a magenta lozenge shape painted on the wall. That magenta also includes a recreation of the aforementioned childish drawing that lent the exhibition its name. The painting is a charming dreamscape of a man in bed, watching TV or reading on a laptop as he drifts off to sleep. His apartment teems with comic-book characters coming to life — two dogs walking on rear legs, a puppet walking on a wall, a duck that resembles a coot if coots were green and cuddly.
Jägel emerged around the same time as Margaret Kilgallen, Barry McGee and Chris Johansen. He shares some of their interests, most notably eccentric figuration derived from cartoons and comics. However, his work is not centered on life on the streets as was theirs. Rather, it’s about what goes on in the imagination of an observant family man over decades jam-packed with change, accompanied by those unforgettable sounds coming out of the speakers.
