FINE ART: Ivor Powell
In the 1960s Norman Catherine was something like the heir apparent or maybe it was Brand-and- Revered-Raspberry to the throne of Fook Island. Fook Island, for those who don’t remember that whimsical nonesuch nonsense, was a diligently documented and solemnly certified place of the mind, invented and ruled with a rod of candyfloss by the then dean of the South African art world, Walter Battiss.
Outrageous, liberating, cloyingly self-conscious, surreal and merely twee by turns, Fook Island nevertheless served as a focus for the imagination, a free space of sorts for the creative impulse, and an arena of desire in a severely repressed society.
In a sense, Catherine has never left Fook Island. Though it has a more atavistic kind of content, it is still rooted in a concern with the reverence for the irrational as a means to liberation. In one of the most striking of the images on the current show at the Goodman Gallery in Hyde Park (until October 8), Catherine’s process is captured in something close to an icon: a sort of man creature — primal, unindividuated, rendered more as the site for a nervous play of surface marking than as a personality — leans into the picture frame. He has emerged from a red sea or field of mud and holds out his catch, a barbel.
The painting, with its rendering of the “first man” and the fish as symbol of the original and mysterious sources of life, gives a classic image of the unconscious — but one that is, frankly, the pap en wors of post-Dali post-modernism.
What is interesting, though, about Catherine’s more recent work and what lifts it above the merely post-facto surrealist, is the particular mood and foreboding that, largely through his use of colour and the particular quality of the mask-like face, he reads into his subject. There is something dark and fearful and flayed about the way he had rendered up the stock image, a different and darker order of expression or revelation that is coming through in the play of imagination.
Not all the works have this stark and powerfully iconic quality. In many of them the interactions of imagery are looser and more playful, with the canvas becoming an analogue for the unfettered activity of the artist’s consciousness. Peopled with brutally cartooned Keith Haring-type figures, beasts, masks and disembodied heads, and punctuated with a freer use of paint, these pieces often achieve an intensity that transcend the basically illustrative nature of the detail.
In the end, though, and this is always the case with work that rests as strongly as this does on imaginative play, Catherine’s works are impossible to pin down. Sure there is a kind of foreboding and a harsh and brutal vision that pervades and informs the work, there is a mixing up of details and styles that creates its own emblematic reality, there are lots of games being played that attest at least to the artist’s skill. But ultimately you either think there is real substance to all this — or you think it is mere simple-minded Fookishness.