Fine Art: Hazel Friedman
I first saw the work of Sandile Zulu (now showing at the Market) during a 1992 exhibition held by Wits University’s Fine Arts Department where Zulu was a student. At the time his burnt offerings struck me as extraordinarily beautiful, but anachronistic in the context of all those post-modern pastiches produced by students who were trying their damndest to make their art look anything but aesthetically pleasing.
Born in Ixopo in 1960, Zulu obtained a fine arts degree at Wits in 1993. Last year he joined the Amakhono Art Centre near Roodepoort, where artist Durant Sihlahli also has a studio. Amakhono — which means talent in Zulu —is like a secular cathedral of sorts, a community centre where artists in all disciplines meet and work. And if Zulu’s recent output is anything to go by, the work emerging from this centre suggests a refreshing post-apartheid sensibility, with the emphasis more on personal expression than reductive political statement.
Sponsored by the French Institute and organised by the Amakhono Centre, Zulu’s first solo exhibition reveals the work of an artist whose star is predictably on the ascent.
Although extremely seductive as fragments — resembling giant pieces of matzos, parchment or skin — his fire paintings work much more effectively as a body of work, their sensuality enhanced by the sense of continuum that runs through the show. And the use of the term “body” is not coincidental, in terms of its literal associations and metaphoric allusions . For the body as natural symbol serves as the site of self-struggle, a place where rites of purification, exorcism and immolation are performed.
Therein lies the dialectic of Zulu’s fire paintings. They speak simultaneously of a process of purgation, consumption and renewal from destruction, like the phoenix rising from the flames.
They also speak of elemental primal states — as microcosms of life’s duality — and of totems and archetypes. They are like the residue of a prehistoric era unearthed from an ancient archaeological site. Their pocked surfaces speak of ritual scarification, the etchings of experience.
But it’s still early days for Zulu and in reading too much into these works there is the danger of romanticising them or imposing on them an arid intellectualism. Ultimately they reside in a formalist realm, serving as decorative surface displays. Depending on which stream of consciousness you choose to splash in, you can read them as such, or see them as worlds in a grain of sand.
* Sandile Zulu has been invited to the Reunion Island in December to participate in an international workshop exhibition called Seven Artists, Seven Countries.