Surreal landscape art opens door to exploration
ADESIRE to map territory, cities and natural phenomena is one of the dominant threads running through South African contemporary art. From Gerhard Marx, Marcus Neustetter, John Phalane, Titus Matinyane and Richard Penn to newcomers such as Chloe Reid, artists are seemingly fixated with charting the landscape, though it has mostly been through alternative cartographical practices.
Plainly speaking, these artists are concerned with remaking maps, whether destroying existing ones, such as Reid who cuts out street names, or creating completely abstract ones that defy the scientific, such as Neustetter.
Sarah Biggs’s new body of paintings at the Barnard Gallery in Cape Town, might not been rooted in cartography, but it is inspired by geological discovery. Her interest in how the landscape is understood not only ties up with this interesting strand in contemporary art, but extends it in an interesting direction.
As with the abovementioned artists, in the paintings in Further Afield, she identifies a place within visual culture where science and art meet; where the two seemingly divergent disciplines are both consumed with grasping huge unquantifiable phenomena. Biggs doesn’t draw her inspiration from geologists’ visual records, but rather opts to depict these scientific characters in the titular field.
Not that they are the focus of the paintings; in fact, you have to strain to find them. She renders them in miniature to draw attention to the vast scale of the territory they are probing and perhaps the futility, madness or arrogance that compels their work. Significantly, these tiny geologist characters appear male and wear white hats that could be pith helmets, the headgear we associate with European colonialists of bygone eras. In this way, this scientific study could be a politically skewed one. Not that Biggs teases this out at all. By reducing their presence in the pictorial frame, she prompts two readings. She renders the colonial explorer as insignificant in the larger scheme of things and places them within a history (and future) that spans beyond their influence.
The scale could also imply an inability for our society to measure the extent of influence not only on how they developed tools to measure and own the landscape, but its representation through art.
Artists, but especially painters, cannot contemplate the natural landscape without the burden of the western art canon bearing down on them. Every rendering of it now can be viewed only in relation to everything that has come before, which sort of robs artists of their “sight”. In this way, the act of painting is no longer about “seeing” but “reseeing”, which gives this little geologist-explorer character another function as someone not simply analysing the landscape, but the history of painting.
In some instances, such as in Earthflow, the natural feature, a deep ridged valley, has detectable contours — we can make out what it is. In other works, such as Amidst it All, or Mine, this explorer figure is rooted in an abstract setting, though with allusions to nature.
This suggests that he has stepped into another territory, beyond land or the visual. It could be a psychic space, but in Mine, it is also a painterly realm and a vast sociopolitical terrain. As the title implies, the character could have entered a subterranean level — the mines. The golden palette affirms this, though there are no other physical markers evoking this hugely symbolic site that is a touchstone for our difficult history. Rooted in a cloudlike setting, the explorer could be enraptured by the sublime — an historical theme in painting that aims to evoke not only the grandness of nature, but also the metaphysical world. He could also be wading through a miasma of ignorance — the conditions in the real world he maybe refuses to see — like his effect on the environment or the sociopolitical upheavals his domination and measuring of the landscape has generated. The stance this figure adopts implies a level of arrogance and security that the surrounding abstract background contradicts.
This may, of course, be a projection of contemporary concerns and the debates around the blatant denial and ignorance surrounding the continued influence and effect of white supremacy.
As a new painter to the scene — this is Biggs’s first solo exhibition — she might not have wanted to nail her colours to the mast. Or perhaps, like so many of her generation, she grasps that our historical baggage cannot be unpacked in a single painting or even body of work.
Perhaps all artists can do is open a door and it is up to us to choose to step inside their work and, like the little figures that populate so many of Biggs’s works, commit to be curious no matter how abstract the overall picture might be. Biggs’s execution and approach encourages us to go on this journey.
Text subsidised by the gallery, which has no editorial say.
Further Afield shows at the Barnard Gallery, 55 Main St, Newlands, Cape Town until December 1.