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| Selected Exhibitions |
Window into the South African landscape, 1994
Painting has been the medium that has provided me with a language, a set of conventions and limitations that I have struggled with. My progress as an artist has derived largely from trying to keep the medium fresh rather than moving into different fields. My early use of oil as a direct, spontaneous and open-ended medium of expression has evolved into a more considered approach where the problems of what it means to paint have played a greater role. Why paint when there may be more appropriate ways of dealing with particular subjects? I found this question, far from undermining my natural inclination to paint, spurred a systematic investigation into aesthetics and the limitations of painting. The kind of questions that have come up include: At what point does the artists’ mark or gesture infer or take on greater meaning than that it is paint and that the artist put it there? Would it be interesting to make paintings that refer almost entirely to themselves 60 years after American Abstract Expressionism? Is it possible to make figurative work in South Africa that excludes race as a dynamic? What is the effect of using paint optically [tone and color] as opposed to materially [where the paint draws attention to its visceral mud like quality]? Is it legitimate to use paint to generate imagery [simply as means to an end] or should the process have some meaning in itself? Questions like these began to influence which subjects I felt painting could deal with, the way I approached them; and on occasion the question became the core subject itself.
My early work was influenced by ideas expressed by Clement Greenberg and the artistic processes of Francis Bacon as expressed in the book, Interviews with David Sylvester. Greenberg suggested that the aesthetic experience was involuntary, that an image acts directly on the senses and the rational mind only steps in afterwards to try and mediate and verbalize what has already taken place. My painting process was an emotion driven series of intuitive decisions resulting in an image that some how felt right. The painting could never be preconceived and its’ meaning was something negotiated in the struggle to arrive at a satisfying conclusion. This attitude was exemplified for me, by Francis Bacons’ insistence on using chance in an intense play between representational and non-representational paint to generate imagery that acted directly on the senses. My approach to painting since these early ideas has been persistently evolutionary and eclectic. Each set of works has provided me with something to react against and draw from.
I developed the tendency to see a painting as entirely artificial and its relationship with the real as complex and tenuous. I started to view the canvas as an arbitrary and unreal arena in which to play, where anything could happen without justification. Within the boundary of the frame anything could happen and was entitled to have a logic and reality of its own. For example in Continuum [1997], (winner of the Royal Over Seas League 14th Annual Open Exhibition in London) I started with a visual concept, which was a single figure viewed from the back repeated across the landscape with a traditional overlapping recession but with a toppling unsteady relationship to the ground. Once the concept was executed, I realized it evoked strongly a particularly South African sense of dislocation in a shifting and uncomfortable social landscape. Following this [now knowing what I was delving into], I completed a series of work that used the artificial space of the canvas as an arena for entirely invented mass figure compositions. Each figure was created through incidental and literal elements. Works such as Populace [1999], and Mass [1999], were selected for CELCIUS [new] Art from the [new] South Africa at the IFA Gallery in Bonn, and formed the core of my submission to the Daimler Chrysler Award for Contemporary South African Art 2000.
In the above works the visual concepts more or less preceded any intended meaning, but their success depended on their resonance with the transitional situation in South Africa. In contrast An Aesthetic For Cruelty And Violence [2000], (merit prize ABSA Atelier 2000) was based on a question; what is happening when something horrific is depicted with all the conventions of pictorial beauty? This inspired a visual journey into the history of the depiction of violence both as an aesthetic enquiry and a way of mediating the contemporary violence in South Africa. Warders [2003] also arose out of a violent context and was based on a question: how do I make a painting about the fear of losing someone you love? The result was a group of painted wooden heads that the public was invited to hammer nails and bits of metal into. The work deliberately blurred the boundary between victim and perpetrator. The interactive aspect of this work is something that I still want to pursue more thoroughly.
In the exhibition Fix, at the Rhodes University Alumni Gallery in 2003, my first stop-frame animation [the title piece] introduced paint as a character in a struggle to define itself. Animation allowed me to introduce time, motion and sound to a static silent medium and provided an arena to deconstruct the pictorial. The frenetic and obscure actions of the paint explored the boundary between representation and non-representation meaning and lack of meaning. [See attached Dialogue with Monique Pelser].
The investigations, which emerged with Fix, led eventually to a new set of large oil paintings in which I attempted to separate the painting process from its pictorial function. I wanted mark-making to have a non-pictorial logic of its own and for the final image to be the residue of that process. For example in Scores [2005], I marked off the number of days I’d lived so far. While the concept required a simple counting process and a meditation on my own mortality, each gesture was an event and a chance for subtle variations that opened the final image to wider interpretation. In Mergers and Acquisitions [2006], I played noughts and crosses with myself until I had covered the whole canvas. The game provided the logic for a mark making process and in choosing to play a seemingly futile game anyway, an unexpected topography and new meanings emerged.
Fear of loss and random misfortune, the vital but contingent nature of the individual, and the passing of time have been dominant concerns in my work. My second stop-frame animation, Earthlings [2006], brings these themes together and attempts to evoke the relentlessness of time passing and the absolute impossibility of marking a moment.
In Caveman Spaceman [2008], I extended the ideas surrounding the transience of life that I began to explore in my previous show, Earthlings(2006).
In Earthlings, the predominant imagery was of bleak and endless landscapes inhabited by fleeting and rather manic beings. These were expressive and entirely generated in an open ended painting process. In Caveman Spaceman, however, I introduced a cooler, more objective set of images with the photographic rendering of sights with which we are so over familiar that we cease to see them: satellite dishes on chimneys, flowers, semi-industrial landscapes. These become objects of contemplation.
To be continued...................................................................................................................