Sense of beautiful intrigue
“RESERVE” Paintings by Cathy Layzell At Salon91 Until Saturday DANNY SHORKEND reviews
THE SENSE of images that require the viewer to complete the image produces a pleasurable viewing experience.
Cathy Layzell hints at natural scenes through abstract and measured flecks and flickers, doodles and dabblings with oil via various brush marks. The effect as the image emerges from a black background is striking. It is as if while on one plane there are abstract marks and configurations, on another there is a clearly articulated natural environment.
Some of the works are more obvious and overt references to nature scenes, others perhaps more about the play of colour, shape and mark-making. At the same time, there is a certain ominous quality, as if these alluring landscapes emerge out of a murkiness or as if, rather than the traditional language of this subject, it is as if these were painted at night.
Perhaps it is the photograph that acts as the intermediary between the pristine atmosphere of nature and the effects of painting that scene.
Various parts of Cape Town and Greyton are Layzell’s source material.
While one might see the works as literal and easy on the eye without challenging the viewer, consider Biosphere where there is a clear indication of sensing a deeper pattern within nature. In this work, nature is enveloped in a geometric shape of sorts, the atmospheric aura, if you will, of the ecosystem, a highly ordered if at times dangerous system.
The effect of plant life and the like, her repeated uses of subtle greens, pinks, purples and yellow, and the tension between order and seeming arbitrariness against a dark background suggest that the life of plant, tree, water and the like emerge from a subterranean, inexplicable source. For the beauty of nature is in the fact that it can be mined for knowledge; it can be appreciated aesthetically, and that living in the city one is often estranged from “it”.
Layzell chooses to omit figures, and the only connection we have is the optical joy of finding nature, of piecing nature together within the dark background from which we stitch “her” together.
This new development of the artist’s style reminds one of those psychological tests where one is given a few cues and clues, a piecemeal fragment from which to form an image.
It is therefore a pleasurable experience finding a complete image even as tree trunks, for example, become a sort of negative space. Yet it is not obvious whether these trees are the result of the foliage that surrounds them receding into the background or in their present-absence endeavour to push forward out of the picture plane.
Layzell writes that there is “an impulse to shape, tame and control the natural world (that) lives alongside a desire to yield to its wildness and its danger”. This is aptly put, and the success of her works is precisely the dichotomy between a sense of beautiful intrigue and hidden, potentially treacherous spaces.
Yet, overall there is a sense that such nature relates to our instinctive need or biological hard-wiring to commune, and it is a fact that even city parks contribute a sense of well-being that leads to health in many respects. Thus conceived, one might describe the artist’s work as conducive to a positive outlook. In a world that often appears nonsensical, this is a welcome boon of optimism. Thus, the title of the exhibition,
Reserve, reflects the dual reality that nature can be preserved amid the concrete jungle, yet such is acknowledged with a tinge of sadness, as if we must tame, separate and isolate nature in such a form to once again associate with “it”.
I suppose a walk on the mountain is called for and perhaps Layzell’s paintings inspire one to do that. At the same time, as paintings they are ironically the preserve of culture reserved for far too few.