Boy artist lets critics cast the first stone
Top-achieving matric pupil expected fury at his ‘satanic art’
● KwaZulu-Natal matric pupil Gary Louw, 18, may be caught up in a social media hell over his “satanic” artwork but art lovers have praised him to high heaven and are prepared to fork out thousands for his “unsettling” pieces.
Some have gone as far as offering to pay for him to study art at university next year, despite his already being accepted to study astrophysics at the University of Cape Town.
In an exclusive interview with the Sunday Times this week Louw, who is a pupil at Grantleigh College in Richards Bay, said a multitude of people and organisations had contacted him with offers to buy pieces and to exhibit and invest in his art.
Hours after receiving the independent school’s Dux award on Monday, his matric artwork was labelled blasphemous.
A video in which a local pastor, Andrew Anderson, lambasts the school for allowing the pupil to display his “satanic” artwork went viral on Monday evening.
The artwork was displayed in the school’s foyer, with other pupils’ work. It included sculptures of heads with horns, papiermaché works using Bible pages and paintings which reference the Last Supper and the creation of Adam. These also drew the ire of many Christians and the African Christian Democratic Party.
Louw has defended his work, saying it explores the “commercialisation of contemporary organised religion as well as the monetary exploitation of the faithful by greedy individuals who hide behind the guise of the church or similar pious institutions”.
“It would be rather ignorant for me to assume that in the process of tackling the theme of religion there wouldn’t be some people who would be offended,” he said.
“I was always cognisant of the fact that there might be a negative response but at the end of the day the value of art is not measured by how many people love the artwork. It is measured in terms of both negative and positive responses.”
He was “definitely” going to pursue his art professionally.
“When I initially put up my exhibition, I felt I might have said all I needed to say. But after all of this started, I realised that this commentary that I brought forward through my art is something very important and that it does resonate with me personally, and evidently with others too. So if anything, this has inspired me to pursue my art further and to create art in this vein of expression.
“I am very interested in the ways people think. I read a lot into science and religion, the difference between fact and opinion and the study of the structure of knowledge.”
He said he and his art teachers often had conversations about the pieces and realised there would be negative reactions.
A sign outside the cordoned-off exhibition warned people that it had “potentially offensive content that was reserved for a mature and sophisticated audience”, he said.
“I want my art to reach out to the viewer and make them think. I would rather create art that perhaps unsettles the viewer a little, but at the end of the day starts a discourse that they will remember, and [that will] perhaps better equip them to live in the multicultural society we find ourselves in, dealing with these controversial topics in honest and sincere ways that aren’t sugar-coated.”
He said he was confident he would get a distinction for visual arts in his matric exam.
Though Curro, which runs Grantleigh College, has apologised to those offended by the artwork, it said an independent examiner had assessed Louw’s work and found it complied with the examination brief.
Curro marketing and communications head Marí Lategan said the artwork had been removed from the foyer, along with all the other artwork, and she would not comment further publicly on the matter.