Form and substance as one seamless whole
FORM & SUBSTANCE: CONTEMPORARY SA ART. A Group Show. At the Erdmann Contemporary until October 17. DANNY SHORKEND reviews
FORM & Substance operates on a number of levels and includes various methodologies and processes. While the title is vague in that it could be used to apply in any number of contexts, it does assist one in developing some kind of overarching thematic umbrella.
This is so as gallerist Heidi Erdmann, passionate as she is about art, has attempted to, in the main include emerging South African artists with a variety of styles, techniques and formal ingenuity. The result is “substance”, where form transmutes into meaning, that is while form refers to the physicality of art materiality, “substance”, understood figuratively refers to the meaning that such works ignite.
Moreover, it is a meaning that pervades the relationships between the various works on offer, rather than simply, or only, as isolated phenomena.
Rory Emmett’s colourman is at once a photograph and painterly, for the artist has painted himself in a variety of colours and photographs the result. Juxtaposed is a photo- graph of a wall he has constructed in what was the former District Six area, the relic of a performance piece.
Nomusa Mkubu creates photographs that are transformed as she literally weaves the image together or as it were, apart, creating a collage-like effect. Gerhard Human and Clare Menck “tease” one another – the former with a graphic-like painting style, while the latter, more traditional and classic. Nicola Roos produces at once functional objects, namely chairs, yet they are also sculptures, headless torsos that only hauntingly invite one to sit.
Eleanor Turvey’s work, a homage to icons such as Picasso and Walter Sisulu employ a variety of methods: painting, collage, graphic design, the use of text and a photographic quality. John Fuller’s works are photographic (B/W photographs shot with Chantal multi aperture camera on photographic paper), but only just as they reveal a certain layering, a serial repetitiveness that disrupts any reference to the familiar “a photograph of x” scenario – rather the effect is almost as if it were a print with a rather abstract quality.
Karien de Villiers’ emphatic, brutal and
robust, guttural expressionistic paintings and drawings form an interesting dialogue with similar emotional intensity, though dealt with differently, namely in the drawings of Jeanne Hoffman, where simplification and patterns placate emotional outburst.
Jan Neethling, in contradiction to the mandate, namely emerging artists, is an artist into his seventies and paints an accomplished portrait of the pensive Robert Hodgins.
Wim Legrand, a master printer, tries his hand at painting and drawing, producing surreal-like images that offset the emotional outburst of the adjacent works of art.
Hannalie Taute complicates the variety on offer with embroidery on rubber – an image that suggests the failure of the individual to find a place in the world.
How then do all these works form a seamless whole? How can form indeed become substance and reverberate as meaning? How does the differentiation of individual artists conjure a sense of clear identity and place where with the merging, ambiguity of material and method, there is no clear-cut articulation of self, no definite category? Is it simply the proverbial conundrum that Magritte posed in his this is not a pipe painting? Is there just some sort of hybridism, merging of identities, an Afro-Europeanism if you like?
A tentative answer or at least some kind of resolution is perhaps given in the only non-figurative work – a lone painting, possibly a landscape that is untitled by Nicola Roos. There, beneath the saturated colures, the reddish-brown earth, there yonder into the depth that it suggests, one sees the possibility of light. Of clarity. It is there that beyond form, within an undefined substance and a substance that is content – the earth – the dust that shapes what is our form. And it is not simply there. It is here.
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