Art fair creates a space for boundless fare to dispel the usual hot air
The Investec Cape Town Art Fair gets under way in less than a month, with the 2024 edition carrying the theme of “Unbound”. Art fairs tend to produce lots of hot air (along with the large amounts of artistic capital being traded) but the programme for this event promises a series of considered responses to the theme.
In addition to the main exhibitor section, curated by the fair’s director, Laura Vincenti, a handful of “special sections” have been commissioned. The curatorial concepts driving these sections are bold and intriguing; three in particular caught my attention.
Generations, curated by Natasha Becker and Amogelang Maledu, links artists who are “at different stages in their career”
though Maledu is careful to point out that it is “not just about dichotomous generational frameworks of younger/older”. Rather, the aim is to produce “intersecting conversations”, including “recurring material concerns and common conceptual preoccupations amongst artists”.
A prominent example is the pairing up of Esther Mahlangu (whose iconic work over half a century will be featured in a retrospective at the Iziko SA National Gallery, opening immediately after the fair) with Bonolo Kavula.
For Maledu and Becker, it’s not so much about creating a sense of artistic past and future meeting in the present of the art fair as it is about “negating the linearity of time”, seeking “continuums of past-present-futures”. And besides, adds their curatorial statement with a shrug, “history is unreliable, and our current world is upside down”.
The ambivalent tone of that half-earnest, half-whimsical assertion echoes the combination of playfulness and seriousness characterising Sean O’Toole’s approach to curating SOLO, a showcase of new work by nine artists. One of SA’s leading art critics, O’Toole is a wordsmith and intellectual whose framing of this section is as thought-provoking as any of the work exhibited may be.
The focus is on painting, “a solitary practice that is both Luddite and ludic”, and an ancient mode of artistic expression that appears constantly as if it is about to be replaced by other forms, methods and materials: “Painting,” writes O’Toole, “having rubbed up against disinterest and neglect so many times, is a medium aware of its own obsolescence and mortality.”
Yet this venerable, putatively analogue practice remains “the medium du jour of commerce and a hallmark of the zeitgeist”, even in the digital age: “The 10 most expensive artworks sold anywhere in 2022 were all paintings.” O’Toole recalls British painter and art critic Adrian Searle’s 1994 exhibition
Unbound: Possibilities in Painting, with its title seeming to prompt the Cape Town Art Fair’s theme three decades later.
“What are the boundaries of painting, and what might its limits be?” asked Searle. O’Toole suggests that painting, as if a personified entity or force, resists boundaries and limits with its “elastic form and unravelling edges, its infiltration into adjacent media of sculpture and photography, as well as spillover into performance, film and digital practices”.
This capacious understanding of what constitutes painting is necessary to engage with the artists featured in SOLO, such as Cairo-based Ibrahim Khatab, who merges painting, Arabic calligraphy, video art and installation, or Johannesburgbased Adrian Fortuin, who likewise adopts a “transmedia” approach.
Painting, so broadly defined as to incorporate this work, arguably ceases to become a useful category. “Painting, a medium seemingly unbound, is now everywhere and also everything,” notes O’Toole, but “this expansion is also a reduction.” Moreover, while painting may be “a big something” in the art world, it is also “a fey material presence”. In Searle’s reckoning, “it is nearly nothing, just a little more than nothing ... dangling from a nail, or leant against a wall, propped on paint cans”.
Perhaps there’s something to be said for doing away with categories, or at least the binaries of big and small or young and old, as well as hierarchies measuring value and worth. Mariella Franzoni, curator of Tomorrows/Today, a special section for emerging artists, sees in the art fair’s theme the potential for “political dissonance”. “A renewed sense of the wild, inspired by queer, feminist, decolonial and materialist studies”, overcoming “the dualities of nature/ civilisation, or masculine/ feminine”.
Sign me up for some unbounding.
PAINTING, AS IF A PERSONIFIED ENTITY OR FORCE, RESISTS BOUNDARIES AND LIMITS
● The Investec Cape Town Art Fair is at the Cape Town Convention Centre from February 16-18.