/ 2 December 1994

Iced meringues at year end

FINE ART: Ivor Powell

THE season is upon us when art galleries put on their festive end-of-year theme exhibitions. Such shows traditionally strive to be “fun” on the one hand — and emporia of upmarket Christmas gifts on the other. Somewhere they usually include in their conception a vague message of goodwill.

The Thompson Gallery was clearly possessed of such warm seasonal feelings when formulating the exhibition A Rainbow Nation Needs a Rainbow Art. What the contributing artists were required to produce was, as the title implies, work based on the significance of the rainbow as symbol, as icon, as warm new South African fuzzy …

In fact, not many of the contributing artists responded to the brief — and one can’t help feeling it is something of a mercy that they didn’t. Almost universally, it is the “rainbow” works that, well … don’t.

Even an artist as usually tough and hard-edged as Erica Hibbert has produced a drawing that would not be out of place in one of those television ads that also feature wire toys, sunsets and two-line biographies of Siphiwe. In a similar vein, there is an abstract vortex with some homely wisdom spiralling out in a way that suggests the artist missed a trick by not having written it in the 11 official languages. There are some wall hangings bricolaged from various bits of applique and quilting, and so on.

Of the artists working with the rainbow theme, the only one who, to my mind, has succeeded in bringing anything of interest to the notion is the eccentric Gordon Froud. Froud works here, as he has for the past year or so, with the basic form of the businessman’s tie. He has used strands of coloured electrical wire to make objects that shimmer and writhe and dislocate themselves on their way to a humorous deconstruction of the necktie as cultural object.

For the most part, though, the works that might constitute reasons for seeing the show have little or nothing to do with the putative subject. The industrial landscapes by Mary Jane Darroll were produced as part of an MA submission on materiality in artmaking. In them Darroll uses industrial materials like lead along with sand, an often very painterly paint and old-master varnishes to generate a distinctively corrupt and post-industrial sense of place.

So, too, the series of almost hauntingly personal etchings by Gabriel Clark-Brown has been recycled from an earlier exhibition. Given the context of the present show, they read as though they have been put up to fill otherwise empty wall space. They deserve more than this.

Similarly, the figurative wall-reliefs by Pietermaritzburg artist Michael Mathews, which mix expressionist paint with planes of tin, deserve to be seen in a situation which allows them more psychic as well as physical space. As it is, they are clustered like goods at a bazaar.

In short, unless there’s a real reason for an end-of-year iced meringue of an exhibition, one wishes galleries would rethink the whole thing. Radio stations, for instance, do a “greatest hits” presentation around this time of year. Builders just go on holiday.

The exhibition closes on December 20