Primitive impulse faces off with spirit- energy
SORTILEGIUM Paintings, prints and sculptures by Nicolaas Maritz At the UCT Irma Stern Gallery Until August 19 DANNY SHORKEND reviews
ENERGETIC swirls and splotches, sinewy line and strong sweeping gestures in luminous enamel as abstracted faces emerge make for a powerful gallery experience.
Maritz can capture both a primitive and primal impulse as well as a kind of digital all-pervasiveness that is compelling as an icon of current portent.
Over and above this, he has captured a kind of spirit-energy of the collective human imagination. The faces are abstracted in their childlike simplicity, yet ooze with life. Life as it emanates from the subtle sensing apparatus: two eyes and two ears, a mouth and two nostrils.
These are the mediators between what is inside and what is outside. These are the doors of perception that negotiate concrete and a notso-concrete sense of the real.
Maritz’s mark-making is rapid and yet surprisingly controlled. The consistency with which his faces emerge with their robust pools of paint and mesmerising line create a sense of vigour and expanded consciousness.
The title of the exhibition, Sortilegium, refers to a kind of divination, drawing of the lots or even a kind of sorcery evolved from simple games like opening a sacred book on a random page, and seeing if it has an answer to one’s question.
Such a practice derives from even before antiquity and extends into the middle or dark ages; it has survived to this day.
This kind of method of inquiry was thought to be sorcery. In the same way, one gets a sense from the artist’s method that he kind of draws with a divination stick; that out of seeming chaos, an order, pattern and structure emerges.
The shine of the enamel urges the eye to dart around the surface of the image. The image itself is one of complexity and simplicity.
On the one hand, a disorderly random spirit-mediumship-inspired taking over-of-the-hand as it were. On the other hand, a will controlling to render these enigmatic faces. Everyone and no one. A symbol, like a stick figure. Abstracted and “without flesh”, they are yet human and humane. For they are not only masks or skulls, but seething with a vision channelled through speech, seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling and tasting.
Maritz’s sculptures are equally compelling and speak to the paintings insofar as found materials appear to have been put together and then painted on with this signature style: energetic swirls and sinewy line; and obvious references to surreal automatic painting, Art Brut, and Jackson Pollock.
They emerge now as not just the head, but a full figure; a strange human-like form. References to what these found objects were are all but rendered imperceptible by the almost obsessive will to cover with paint, to homogenise and unify, even if a curious beast appears to emerge. The spaghetti-like lines could refer to anything from metaphysical unity to neuronal networks to the simple fact and texture of paint expressed through a quality and intensity of line.
Yet in all this uncertainty, it seems that Maritz is charged with a desire for wholeness and healing, as the hand (mind) somehow always seems to be pulled in a circular motion – and then the organs of perception are ignited. Sometimes the eyes generate a curious energy through his striking paint use.
It is particularly exciting to see what some might call distortions or a kind of primitive drawing. This is not an aberrant deviation from the so-called classical norm, but a divination of the power of art to express in visual terms how the spirit of life infuses the vessel with a certain kind of capacity, a genetic wiring, a cellular mission to be, for example, a liver cell or a heart tissue, and so on.
The initial seed differentiates and so the dot and the line interrelate, diversify and become an organism of many parts, that then learns and evolves within a context. Technology renders that context as an excessive overload of data, but with a view to want to know and not harm, these quanta of light can create an ordered pattern.
In this way, we may have conquered the land and the sea and be beginning the “conquest” of space, but we still need to turn inwards, or at least understand ourselves better.
Maritz offers a meditation on the potential for greater self-knowledge that ought to lead to an enhanced and improved world-consciousness.