It is rare to find art that is both beautiful and thoughtful, but Guy Tillim’s Second Nature, an exhibition on show at the Stevenson Gallery in Cape Town, achieves both.
It is a series of photographs of the landscapes of French Polynesia, which may seem to weight it on the aesthetic side. Lush greenery, soaring mountains and island seas are all available in spades. But Tillim has a sensitive way with his medium that demands further exploration.
Landscape is a difficult genre of art in various mediums. It is overdetermined and hyper-symbolic. Our reactions can range from a sickly sense of benign pleasure to vigorous nationalism.
Land can either seem uninhabited, a site for imperial desires or neocolonial fantasies, or racked with Gordian knots of history, ownership and politics. When represented in art, landscape brings its own baggage, a long chain of associations that slip into the most innocent of gazes.
Romanticism of the exotic
Tahiti has a special place in ÂEuropean history as a paradise, a counterpoint to “civilisation”, full of Enlightenment myths and Victorian desires. The famous painter Paul Gauguin fell under this spell and his paintings of Tahiti became subservient to his sexual fantasies and the romanticism of the exotic.
It is not difficult to imagine Tillim as a rugged explorer — a modern-day Captain Cook — discovering rare lands for scientific cataloguing and domination. His images have a sharpness and stillness that only Âcaring for the technology of the Âcamera can produce. It is also not hard to picture him as a mutineer from the HMS Bounty, in love with the beauty of the land and nubile locals, running from the pressures of civilisation. In Second Nature the landscape is idyllic and bucolic; the people, where they appear, do not seem to work or wear shirts.
Although there may be grains of truth in these impressions, Tillim’s photographs cannot be reduced to such simple formulations. He is Âsensitive to the relationship between the print, the frame and the viewer. All the prints are large-scale, floated in neutral grey frames and, significantly, without glass. There is no medium, no filter, between the viewer and the print. The surfaces are an intense matte and no hint of gloss hides the detail. One is aware that this is picture-making rather than some alchemical relationship between reality and the camera.
In works such as Hanaiapa, Hiva Oa there is an excess of detail. Every element is crisp — from the light Âfalling on the leaves to the mountains in the background. Others, such as Mount Mouaroa, have an eye-sucking monumentality bordering on the sublime. This play between the vast and the minute, between form and figure, is a Âclassic trick of making things beautiful that has been used throughout the Âhistory of landscape art.
This aesthetic game, however, is tempered by the presence of a grey tonality behind all the images.
Exploring the everyday
It is not the politically charged grey of colonial decay that Tillim displayed in his Avenue Patrice Lumumba series, although there are similarities. Underneath the verdant plants lurks gloom that is part Tahiti’s famous black volcanic sand, part the watery light, but mostly the inclusion of the everyday in the images.
In some images a gravelly road cuts through the frame, in another a contemporary car sits quietly in the frame. A father and son muck about in some patchy grass. This is not the poetic ruin of the picturesque or the wretched decay of the documentary.
It reminds me of a remarkable painting by Poussin in the 17th Âcentury, when there was a trend for picturing Arcadian pastoral scenes. In The Arcadian Shepherds, Poussin depicts four shepherds encountering a gravestone. Etched into the stone are the words “Et in Arcadia Ego”. Death personified says: “And I too am in Arcadia”; Poussin reminds us of the folly of Utopian thinking.
Although Tillim’s works make no obvious reference to this sly vanitas painting, there is a similar sense that the ordinary exists even in our myths of earthly paradise. At the heart of the most beautiful landscape lies the emptiness of the viewer, the fixed terms of our own mortality.
Second Nature is on at the Stevenson Gallery , Cape Town, until September 3