Marc De Jong Wall Street 2

This painting is built on a complex gridlock of dots whose pattern provides a systematic metaphor for the subject matter. The dots work as a background from which the image is made. Their matrix represents how capitalism acts as an omnipresent architecture for contemporary life: you can choose to focus on other stuff, but money – like the dot pattern in the painting – is always still there, a manmade phenomenon and an inescapable part of life, an occult conundrum. The obscenity and abstraction of the Global Financial Crisis is pronounced by the details of that time and place; the movement of suits, of hair-dos, of hand signals, body language and the colour coding of a man-machine-money interface of electronic handheld devices.

- Marc de Jong