Sex, Lies, and Peanut Shells: The Disturbing Dream Worlds of Artist Joseph Yeager | art

‘A“All paintings are in their own way accusations and confessions. That’s what a lie detector is about,” says Joseph Jaeger. This is the title of the artist’s new exhibition, his first since joining the prestigious London Gallery of Modern Art in 2024, which for him marks the opening of a new headquarters in St James’s.

Honesty is important to Yeager, whose upbringing in the United States in Helena, a town he says ambitiously calls itself the capital of Montana, was as decent as it was ordinary. “We would sit down to dinner together every night, we would go to church every Sunday, we were very polite, and traditional in almost every sense of the word.”

His astonishing work ethic is further evidence of his sound upbringing: when we meet in his studio, a week or so before the exhibition opens, the seventeen paintings that will be included in the Lie Detector exhibition are long gone and the wall is covered instead with canvases destined for his New York gallery, Gladstone, next year. “I will be working for the next several months, perhaps as a way to deal with my own fears,” he says with a heavy dose of self-deprecation.

Although his early ambitions as a film director were interrupted by the realization that he was a “very bad director,” his paintings are the result of careful planning and chance. “Really,” he says. “A lot of times the action happens in front of you.”

Now 39 years old, Yeager received his MA from the Royal College of Art in London in 2019, and is now much talked about in art circles. He works exclusively in watercolor over gesso – a hard-drying white paint traditionally made with plaster – on canvas or linen. You wouldn’t guess it: from a distance, and in reproduction, his paintings, many of them large-scale, look like film stills, with the gloss of a wet lip or the paper crease of an eyelid preserved in glossy, hyper-realistic intensity. Only when you get very close do their surfaces reveal deep, regular scars, marks, and fissures like those found in a drought-ravaged river bed.

The people he depicts are actually taken from film stills cropped from their original contexts. Meanwhile, the artist’s touch appears in the fragments of a pistachio shell, the clumps of dust from the studio floor, or the cookie wrapper, forever attached to the picture surface like a dog’s footprint in wet cement.

Jaeger writes a script for each exhibition. In this case, we are told that this is the text of a polygraph test – or polygraph – taken by the artist, in which only his answers are revealed. It is a meandering, fragmentary document in which a voyeuristic encounter with a neighbor is intertwined with what appear to be memoirs relating to his work, his daughter, his Catholic upbringing, and his art criticism.

Did he really take a test? “In all respects that matter,” Yeager says vaguely, adding that he believes the polygraph “was long debunked as a method.” [of discovering the truth] He’s clumsy and kind of stupid. But as a metaphor, there’s a lot of meaning that lies in this vulnerable little machine, it’s really powerful and dark. “It doesn’t surprise me that the Trump administration is using lie detectors — they are highly encrypted by the Trump administration.”

Instead of polite adherence to the text, the panels become dangerously uncontrollable, like fragments of raw memory. Does the face carry violent force or exciting emotion? Are the eyes hiding behind the mask complicit or terrifying?

“Once I finish the script, I start sifting through the archive of collected images and memories,” says Yeager. “I end up in these intense states of flow—where you completely disappear as a conscious mind when you’re painting, and disappear into an interiority that you can’t find a language for when you come back out.” The fact that there is so much darkness in the paintings is part of the adventure. He says about himself: “There are no deep, never-ending psychological wounds.” “I think you were probably born with depression.”

Despite the lapse, Yeager’s Catholic upbringing is solid, and the clean-windowed Kill Birds, in which a woman’s face is seen through a confessional booth screen, is one of hundreds of explicitly Catholic paintings he painted. The line of repentance draws the artist to the difficulty of his work – the hours spent painting on the floor, fighting the fundamental incompatibility between watercolor and gesso.

Partly as a result of this, there are many dead paintings beneath the surfaces, evidence of which can be seen on the bare edges of unframed canvases, which are thick with layers of plaster and inlaid pigments. The thing about gesso, Yeager says, is that the paint can be completely removed: “I can erase this down to nothing.” Instead, at the edges of the painting, he tells a different story—perhaps the most important story of all, about our need to leave a mark, to leave an impact.