Gert Reising (2001)

What is combined in the paintings, between painting and collage, with photos from newspaper clippings and excerpts of letters to produce a common colourful sound, remains open in the drawings and is strictly separated from the paintings by the graphic layout. A dance begins across the paper, a construct of foil-like levity, leaping, narrating, striking and catching random splashes of Indian ink; it becomes a tumbling of elements as a basso continuo of the image between free lines, quirky characters and snippets of words, yet never throwing them off-kilter. Jäger restored the equilibrium of his symbols, of his filigree figurations and rough brushstrokes from the disharmony of techniques and designations, alternating continually from standing leg to striking leg, as it were, the spaces seemingly linked by extended horizontals. Consistently captured in such an idiosyncratic and harmonious order, the image is abstractly and structurally composed using a bizarrely figurative and scenic approach. Indeed, these folios maintain a stability in the mystification, in large characters and their dissolution, as if one were searching for recollections of formerly figurative compositions. But in the balancing out of the elements, the unambiguousness is settled, and the ambiguous gains traction and becomes hope.