Masterly but enigmatic art
W HENa renowned artist such as Heather GourlayConyngham produces work that displays technical mastery and enigmatic content, it is not by accident but by design.
So asking why the artist has painted this way is perhaps not the right question. Also not right is asking what it means.
How do I respond to a reclining nude that could as well be dead? Why is she arranged among so much crockery in what could be a bizarre fetish?
What don’t I understand and why do I not like it very much?
Getting a photographer to write an introduction to hyper-real paintings has a certain amount of rather charming cheek, but David Goldblatt offers a sound response to the works’ enigmas.
“She is engaged in a search for something that she probably cannot name. It has become life-changing and consuming. Here, in this exhibition, is the unfolding richness of the search.”
Gourlay-Conyngham is a Pietermaritzburg resident whose exhibition, titled Unfoldings, is on view at Durban’s KZNSA Gallery in Glenwood, where she shows a series of large nudes, one male figure and other works featuring women in different situations.
She writes about her work: “People interest me. I like to observe how they look and behave. But I also like to zoom in, scrutinise detail, and focus in on what constitutes individuality.
“The more I examine surfaces, the more it seems to reveal what lies beneath. My imagery is intended to challenge a stereotypical idiom with visual directness and conceptual subtlety.”
Gourlay-Conyngham has been a teacher for many years. She is an academic with several degrees. Yet perhaps there-in still lies the catch.
She represents the world around us as she sees it. She is totally accurate. Realism is her forte. She can paint with absolute precision – and that in itself is an art. Yet at the same time this is where GourleyConyngham falls short.
Her nudes are mostly female. They are just naked, the paintings polite and accurate. Flesh, face or legs… it is all the same. Ceramic, cup, carpet or cushion all have detail and have been observed with equal importance. My eyes travelled around and around the painting in a search for life; it was missing.
Gourlay-Conyngham’s catalogue, which shows a large proportion of work, has a foreword by Goldblatt and an essay by Juliette Leeb-Du Toit, a lecturer at the Centre for Visual Art on the Pietermaritzburg campus of the University of KwaZulu-Natal.
On the Glenwood gallery’s mezzanine level you will come across a solo exhibition by Lanel Janse van Vuuren, In Absentia, a representation of photographic portraits.
The awareness of the death of an individual creates a tangible sense of absence in the photographic portraits in this series. At the start of the project, the images were single representations of a moment that had led to death.
Janse van Vuuren uses death as a strategy to construct images that give symbolic clues or traces to the manner in which the subject died.
Janse van Vuuren has been a photographer for more than a decade. Professionally, she specialises in portrait photography and has collaborated on commercial projects that include artistic projects, book and magazine covers.
Today she is a full-time lecturer of photography.
Janse van Vuuren’s artistic work mainly addresses literary and philosophical ideas about an “absent” form of portraiture.
She experiments with multiple exposures, slow shutter speeds and a variety of camera equipment.
Her aim is to describe the invisible and intangible world within her imagination.
Both exhibitions at the KZNSA Gallery are on view until 2pm on September 30.