Artist’s legacy kept alive in playful book
THE GALLERY, the picture frame, podium or pedestal as well as the art book are systems of order through which art is presented and understood. Usually such mechanisms determine an authoritative, dictatorial kind of framing device or tone that can’t easily be deconstructed.
However, this hefty and bulky book is a kind of artwork – and doesn’t dictate or tame the images such that the work dissolves into an abstract, theoretical schema.
One finds a playful and beautifully colourful book wherein Paul du Toit’s artwork comes alive without been overrun by the abundance of text.
The book is a dedication and acknowledgement of his art.
Du Toit focuses on faces and/or figures – caricatured, primitive, naive and drawn from Miro with blotches of colour and stringy line. The colours are generally the primaries, pure with a strong white-black dynamic and the rare mix of secondary and tertiary hues. It’s childlike, even recalling cave art.
Even though his work forms a significant wholeness or unified methodology and subjectfocus, his figures don’t become automaton, rather the grainy, textured surfaces of his brushwork and what might be called unconscious competence may stimulate in the viewer a sense of effortless ease. The high-quality reproductions ensure that textures are evident.
The book includes a documentation of his sculptures within natural environments and the interaction of his signature figures – distorted, playful, moving – is curiously apart from nature.
The text describes the artist as larger than life, his predilection for punk rock and his courage in battling cancer, which led to his death. A book such as this keeps his legacy alive. There is an excellent chronology at the end of the book with photographs from the artists’ life as it traces his history. The weaving of text, artworks, images of the artist, even notebooks are well documented given one a sense of the man.
PAUL is available at the Book Lounge in Roeland Street or contact lorettedutoit@mac.com.