SIGHT SPECIFIC
Janine Stephen takes a closer look at a show of intricate work in an optometrist’s gallery
THE 1920s Art Deco shopfront is all glistening black and silver chrome. Spidery stained-glass windows spill light into this architectural landmark at 104 Longmarket Street, Cape Town, and eyewear winks from antique display tables as one of the oldest working lifts in the city hauls patrons to Mullers Gallery on the first floor. Here, the far-sighted may need glasses to peer at the intricate details of Sine Die (Latin for indefinitely, or “without a day”). The exhibition is part calligraphy, part mini-novella and part illuminated manuscript.
“What better place for reading than in an optometrist’s gallery?” says artist Werner Ungerer, 39, originally from Prieska in the Northern Cape. The gallery, in the building Mullers Optometrists has occupied for four generations, is out-of-time. (Its elevator, jocularly called a time machine, travels to a museum on the third floor where fake eyes, old ledgers and optometry equipment lie blindly, their era long over).
Ungerer has created a series of what he calls portraits, although no eyes blink from the parchment on the walls. Instead words crawl or seep from the surfaces in dense blocks, reeling in the viewer. Each is an imagined world; a character who comes to life, emitting streams of consciousness from a flat page. Each is written in exacting script, mostly calligraphy, and the “people” go about modern lives, doing such ordinary things as answering mobile phones.
An early influence for the work was an information sheet in a box of pills. “I thought how extraordinary, all this information crammed onto a piece of paper that’s folded [into a tiny object]. I became fascinated by how much information can be loaded on a flat surface. [My works] are stories, mini-movies on a flat surface.”
Ungerer’s process is a layering of ideas. Images and photographs usually spark an idea, which grows until it’s a real person.
White Noise, for example, a magenta text written in Littera Bastarda, a gothic script commonly used for legal documents, was sparked by a photograph of an old man in a grubby New York subway in the 1970s.
“I got interested in the idea of someone very vulnerable living in a very hectic, merciless environment,” says Ungerer. The man became so real to Ungerer that one night in Mouille Point, as the fog horn blared, he could hear him clearly: “bitching”, “dissatisfied”.
As with all the calligraphy, Ungerer had to learn to form the letters. “It’s literally like going back to school, sitting with grid paper and slowly learning each letter shape, then writing combinations. And you need to practise, it is muscle memory.” He is self-taught. “I’ve always been interested in the hand, the shapes it can make, just the sensuality of writing,” he says.
A few years ago, he listened to an audiobook on Irish monks who copied manuscripts and distributed them to save them for the future. Thus began the twoand-a-half-year creation of Contra
Nature — Ungerer’s manuscript about a priest written in old Gothic lettering, consisting of 18 crafted leaves. Sparked by a slick Gucci ad, it deals with “not seeing very obvious aspects of yourself and then one day suddenly you need to deal with them”. The text’s placement on the pages hints at the content; for example, a surreal scene where the priest is possibly attacked on a beach has empty spaces on the page: stab marks left in the text.
Ungerer learnt calligraphy using a step-by-step internet guide — and through e-mailed exchanges with a mentor in the UK. In an analogue twist, she sent him some nibs in the mail. He refers to his calligraphy as “unorthodox” and is not concerned with perfect form. “It’s a way of communicating, a form of handwriting . . . as soon as it’s too perfect I lose interest because then you may as well print.”
By his own admission, Ungerer finds reality a tricky place, an overwhelming barrage of ugly signboards, fonts, newspaper headlines, magazine covers and posters. Work helps. “I prefer to live in this state where you can write your own rules, almost. You struggle to put this thing down and you get it done — then there’s a deep sense of satisfaction. It feels like there’s one corner of the universe that is ordered to your liking.”