The development of everyday life

For his new series, Deelstra painted scenes of everyday urban life. However, nothing is as it seems. Deelstra's paintings are ominous due to unusual color usage and alienating scenes. The scenes are painted with technical accuracy and appear as bursts of recollection. These dreamscapes are taken from Jonat’s past like a diary. The workers are shown shaping reality. In Jonat’s hometown of Amsterdam, he sees builders working day and night to raise huge apartments and offices from the ground up. The world around him is changing fast, and the nostalgic artist seems unable to keep up.

The architecture in the work Bridging the Gap appears unreliable and by concealing the faces of his figures, the works take on an eerie quality. The construction worker, a recurring theme in Jonat’s oeuvre, symbolizes an anonymous collective of workers without whom a city could never have been built. The workers appear to be fixing the unfixable in a continuous struggle to maintain a structured society. The work Screw it seems to portray some kind of mishap. There is an accident waiting to happen in some of the works. Therefore the works invite the viewer to think about what happened before and after this moment in time.