FINE ART: Hazel Friedman
FOUR Young Artists, at the Newtown Galleries, is more than a showcase for new kids on the block. Consisting of works by artists with little prior exhibition experience, it successfully creates a series of correspondences and juxtapositions based — refreshingly — as much on serendipity as on artistic intention.
And the fact that the artists hail from different art institutions generates a fascinating discourse between the regional influences informing their work.
Brendhan Dickerson’s wittily executed sculptures — with their stringent formal and intertextual preoccupations — bear the Michaelis art-school imprint, while the predilection for conceptualism on the part of Wits University and the Wits Technikon achieves cogent expression in the works of Hentie van der Merwe (a university graduate) and Alex Trapani, who is technikon-trained.
Conversely, the slightly anachronistic abstract paintings and sculptures produced by James Reed from Port Elizabeth Technikon communicate a sensibility which — at the risk of making unfair generalisations — is unmistakably Eastern Cape in origin.
With the exception of Reed, who is more preoccupied with form than content, each artist focuses on issues permeating an angst- filled and traumatised society: sex, death and faith.
Trapani, for example, explores the rituals of sacrifice and salvation through scriptural numerology, everyday objects such as flour bags (metaphors for the body of Christ) and vessels of religious consumption such as church chalices filled with wine (symbolising Christ’s blood).
Of particular note is an impromptu installation of wine-filled glasses representing communion, neatly displayed along the gallery stairwell. Each ascending level – — ingeniously lit by a “trinity” of gallery lights overhead — signifies another step along the stairway to heaven. The meaning of this work is both enhanced and transformed by its placement within the gallery and its relationship to the rest of Trapani’s works.
Although verging on the esoteric in places, Van der Merwe’s Insatiable Series also conveys a powerful sense of formal and conceptual cohesion. His exploration of life, death and memory is most poignantly articulated in the epitaphs to Leo, Johan and Bruce. Resembling tombstones, with dates of birth and death inscribed on each “headstone”, they are virtually devoid of figurative expression except for the outlines — made from pin- holes — tracing the torso of each deceased.
Although rather twee in places, Dickerson’s work stands out in terms of its formal sophistication. Constructed from wrought iron, wood and found objects, they are literally laden with references to surrealism (the Magritte bird-cage), the genre of 17th-century still-life (vanitas symbols) and theatre of the absurd. They speak of a European existentialist sensibility, yet are equally reminiscent of totems and shrines to pagan
But what strikes one most about this show is “the incredible balancing act” — to use the title of a work by Dickerson — between artists and material, medium and message. This makes Four Young Artists worth much more than a passing glance.
Four Young Artists is at the Newtown Galleries in Johannesburg until February 24