THE ARTIST’S PRISM. A group exhibition. At Eclectica Modern, Claremont, until Saturday. DANNY SHORKEND reviews
LINGERING for a while, the works begin to envelop one and become charged with meaning. Teapots in oil by Paul Birchall refract light and surrounding space; Jeremy Dyer’s busy mixed media works are both fractured and unified; Wonder Marthinus’s work exudes a gentle, soft light, while Anthony Cawood’s paintings demonstrate the subtle nuances of light that are the various colour frequencies.
Each in their own way explore and interpret the ever nuanced possibility that is light as it separates into various hues as it passes through a prism. A prism and passing light may symbolically allude to the mystery of consciousness.
Birchall exhibits a keen eye for detail. These intricate paintings at first appear merely decorative designs. Yet on closer inspection, these colour combinations bespeak a thematic relevance, namely how this inert object – the teapot – is a centre through which other images come to the fore.
These “other” images are Irma Stern works located at the Stern gallery and thus the teapot becomes a kind of reflective mirror, at the same time attenuating the light. Such is consciousness – it absorbs and takes in what is, while simultaneously changing, interpreting – it is the coloured lens through which reality is mediated.
Dyer’s work recalls Klimt’s congested canvases. His skull II reminds one of Damian Hurst’s skull studded with diamonds. One gets the sense that the artist is attempting the arduous task of assimilating traditional art history, pop culture and mythology in order to then create a synergy where contradiction, beauty and mystery co-exist. The artist calls his method “integrative collage”, an apt phrase that captures his use of magazine and newspaper cutouts, steady line and multi-dimensional levels.
Marthinus’s painting hover curiously between abstraction and reference to actual “things”.
His line is both scratchy and gentle, supported, as it were, by a palette that is not harsh, but rather a surface that keeps the eye enamoured in the spaces between, around and within the more tangible forms. There is a kind of emptiness that is at the same time heartfelt, a vacancy that stirs the viewer into reverie and wonder. Time appears to slow down as one may be enveloped by the mark, in contrast to Dyer’s work, which is about speed and intensity.
Cawood’s paintings exhibit a marked aptitude for observation and a Cezanne-like patchwork of colours and a painterly concern with what the brush can do. His figures appear to be deep in thought, occupying the same space and yet uncommunicative or simply a single figure, self-absorbed or merely an objectified body.
Yet, over and above what these figures and contexts might mean, the assertive mark-making, the very interest in paint and mark contrasts the perceptible absence of brushwork in Birchall’s work, the collage-inspired Dyer and the pastel-like affects of Marthinus. In this respect, the artists’ prism – no pun intended on the word “prison” – is indeed a unique vantage point and something to laud in art, namely personal, free expression.
This need not be taken lightly, for I would claim that it is precisely this freedom (of expression) that is the basis for an uncorrupted society.
On the other hand, the fact may be that art is innocuous and so freedom of expression, even wild abandon (liberty?) is precisely what may happen in the arts, while injustices prevail unchecked in other domains of life (even political art is merely co-opted under capitalism, or censored by other systems).
Seen holistically, while individual prisms’ mark the exhibition, as it were, I do see a linkage between these disparate images.
There is, in my estimation, in the sheer attention to colour harmony, a reference to a mystical dimension. By mystical I simply mean a sense of “other worldliness”, a metaphysics if you will. This sensibility cannot, by definition be easily transmitted – it is ineffable.
As it is said, “The Tao that can be expressed, is not the Tao”.
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