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HROUGH grotesque portraits and haunting images (and a sculpture) of clouds, Robyn Penn’s exhibition at David Krut gallery in Parkwood, Joburg, explores climate change, its impact on humanity and the men responsible for distorting the facts about global warming.

Though Penn is known for her exquisite renderings of clouds, this exhibition, in some ways, marks a weighty swing from her usual motifs. I say “some” because Penn’s art has always been entrenched in the idea of our species’s oneness with nature, our visceral, intricate and unfathomable molecular place in the cosmos. There are elements of that in this exhibition, yet Penn, by her own admission, has never before created things with a social or political bent in mind.

“I’m not an outspoken person,” she says. “I don’t want to necessarily argue or fight for a cause, so with my previous work I was hesitating to take on any political role. This is quite a big step for me.”

Penn is not outspoken, this is true. She is reserved and pixie-like, with alert greeny-brown eyes. But she’s very good at getting her message across, even verbally. “I’ve been looking at global warming for some time,” she says, “and what started to emerge was the people at the core of the debate. The people who denied climate change are the same people who denied the harms of tobacco and asbestos and secondary smoke. That was completely alarming.”

You automatically think that such nefarious refutations are motivated by monetary and political gain, and they are, but it’s also more complex than that. Pre- and post-Cold War, the West was so staunchly entrenched in capitalism that it felt any kind of regulation and/or government intervention would be more harmful than the dangers of tobacco et cetera. So facts were ignored or swept under carpets to “protect” citizens from the truth.

“In 1969, an internal memo was distributed in the tobacco industry that overtly says that the best weapon is doubt,” says Penn. “What they realised is that in science there’s always an element of doubt — they never claim to know everything, and so all they needed to do was present that doubt, to say we don’t know this or that, and so when the world was kind of set to make changes [regarding climate change] in the early 1980s” — remember the eradication of CFCs? — “they went into full force of denying climate change and creating doubt.” “They” are not only scientists, they’re economists and oil/chemical industrialists. Penn has painted distorted portraits of these men, giving them mangled features and bad skin and pink ears (an emblem of their shame). She also found pictures of the subjects as youths and merged the innocent face with the grown-up corporate façade. “When you look at these people, they play the part — the only images you find are of them in their suits, head and shoulder, corporate images where they’re presented in the way that you would trust them,” she says. “So my question was, ‘How do you represent evil? How do you show the underlying sinister character that’s beneath this façade?’ “There’s something like dictators in these men because they’re highly intelligent and charming. The first portraits I did, specifically of oil giants David and Charles Koch, they were too good-looking and I had to repaint them.”

The depictions of clouds — many of them the same singular Highveld cumulonimbus set against a black background — are, Penn says, a metaphor for nature and the sublime. Also, when it comes to climate change, clouds become this thing that can either add to the warming or the cooling.

“Cloud of Unknowing” is the title of Penn’s exhibition, and it is also a mystical 14th-century text by an anonymous author. The text is based on the idea that God is elusive and that the best way to be truly faithful is not to question, to rather release yourself to that sense of unknowing.

“My interpretation is not a religious one,” Penn says. “It’s rather that sense of the world . . . It’s so vast it’s unthinkable, and that sense of unknowing is magical for me.” LS