10.17.25 — Art as Archaeology
For Remy Jungerman, diversity has a deeper history than the art scene often allows. He finds in Suriname not just personal or family tradition, but also a source for abstract painting and a space between anthropology and art. I admired his work enough, though, I reviewed it as recently as 2021, at Fridman on the Bowery. Rather than start over, allow me to fill it out only slightly here and in that past review, in light of his latest work, the substance of Modernism, and the rivers that connect his life, through October 12, as a longer review and my latest upload.
Why make abstract art? One might divide painters into the material and the spiritual by their answer. Some love the material presence of the stretcher, canvas, and paint, and they want to make it inescapable for you as well. Others set aside representation and narrative for something beyond words. You might have thought you knew which to call Remy Jungerman when his 2021 show continued into the basement for a film titled Visiting Deities. Barnett Newman called a painting Vir Heroicus Sublimus, or man the sublime hero—but who needs earthly heroes, especially men, when you can live among the gods?
Think again. Jungerman could be the ultimate materialist, layering on a hard white surface of Kaolin clay and incising into it. The cuts reveal another layer still, of colored fabric. But then the filmmaker kept his beliefs to himself, too. Bonno Thoden van Velzen was still a graduate student in 1962, when he left the Netherlands for Suriname. He asked how religion for its native peoples could define or bridge their differences.
Jungerman takes his turn as an anthropologist, too. He calls a work Agida, after a drum used among the Maroons in Suriname in their music and rituals (like agita without the heartburn). He calls another as well as new new work Obeah, which encompasses justice, healing, and an entire way of life. The paintings could well be artifacts, with their parallel slits as ancient mappings or alphabets. Wall sculpture in painted wood acts as shelves for ceramics and goodness knows what else. They are the material presence of other lives.
In descending to view the film in 2021 one might have been on a dig. (The 2025 show includes a new film as well, in the backroom. It sets out on rivers.) Jungerman’s interest, though, is neither scholarly nor abstract. Born in Suriname, he has Maroon ancestry on his mother’s side. When he moved to the Netherlands to study art, he was reversing a typical history of colonialism, Latin American art, black Caribbean art, and the Afro-Caribbean diaspora.
He was recovering his roots, too, as a Dutch artist and a modernist, drawn, he explains, by three rivers—the Cotitca in Suriname, the Amstel, and the Hudson. The relief sculpture has the primary colors and rhythms of Piet Mondrian—and nothing is more important to the younger artist than rhythm. He calls the show “Brilliant Corners,” after an album by Thelonius Monk, the jazz pianist with a singularly jagged touch, and the cryptic alphabets may also suggest musical notation. No wonder Jungerman likes nothing about the Maroons more than its drumming. No wonder, too, that the fabric looks suspiciously like standard-issue plaid. So much for ancient spirits.
They look so standard issue that one could dismiss his themes as a conventional bow to politics and diversity. One might never know of them without the titles. Still, they are personal concerns, and anyway the paintings look just fine without them. Without the reference points, in fact, they might look more daring still—a rejoinder to the current fashion for blurring the lines between abstraction and representation. When it comes down to it, the division between the material and the spiritual is overrated. For both, the point of abstract art is to set aside routine stories in order to make you see.