FINE ART: Ruth Sack
GHETTO Opera House, massive and heavy, presides over Lucky Sibiya’s exhibition at the Everard Read Gallery. Into the multifarious sub-divisions of its architecture of bone, string, skin, paint, decaying machine parts, driftwood, rust, one is drawn without resistance or desire for explanation. Sibiya seems to be having some kind of party. Even where the titles hint at previous darkness (… After the Nightmare; … After His Ordeal; The Artist and His Injured Finger …; Pain), most of the works still seem to express a permanent state of surprised pleasure; something like that of Paul Klee.
In constant danger of lapsing into decorative predictability, nevertheless, in the best of his works on this exhibition, Sibiya imbues his figures and animals with a primal exactitude and poignancy which compares with the painters of Lascaux or the sculptor of Willendorf. And of his best, the collage of flattened iron, Sunrise and Horse Rider, is exquisite in its skill (and restraint).
Jackson Hlungwane, at the Newtown Galleries, continues his extended and subtle collaboration with nature. More smoothly polished and refined than recently, his figures (especially the animals, like Bull For Up and Big Rain Bird For New Country), are taut with withheld energy and precise trajectories.
A dog leaps upon a rabbit. With the arching power of his fish of old, Hlungwane’s dog and hapless rabbit meet in a moment as magnetically profound in its way as was God’s finger meeting the finger of Adam.
A majestic piece depicting the four faces of God Himself wonderfully reveals four very probably godly moods: kindly, irritable, depressed, and bored unto eternity.
Hlungwane shares the space with David Koloane. Much has been written about Koloane’s artistic process as a kind of ”research”, as ”breaking down” received modes in order to find new, more basic languages with which to explicate township life, its rawness, with an excavating, searching mark-making.
But if the most recent works are an outcome, I respectfully suggest that Koloane resume his search. In this series, images of Zionist church-goers — extraordinary subject-matter — have died on the canvas: flat, clumsy forms are demarcated by mindless and exhausted lines.
Nothing if not a superb colourist in the past, here Koloane has drenched his relentlessly dreary primary colour with a wash of grime over the surface. With what intention? To ”express the dirt of the townships” (as one tentative theory went)? Or to integrate the otherwise disparate areas of colour? The work offers no explanation.
Hoping to find resonances, one looks for Giottoesque spirituality or serenity (to elevate the bulk); but the repeated and declamatory cross-shape is the only sign of any religious intent.
The dog paintings, painted slightly earlier, are different. Tense, erect-tailed, vicious- eyed, they are dogs of war. The neurosis, fear and cruelty they embody is powerful and horrific.
Why is it that the converse — the optimism and celebration of humans at worship — seems so difficult to achieve? Perhaps the intensity of feeling that begat the dog paintings needs to find a new and equally intense, but positive, equivalent. What is necessary is not then a search for technique, perhaps; but for the capacity to be moved, again.
Sibiya exhibits at the Everard Read Gallery until March 30; works by Hlungwane and Koloane are on view at the Newtown Galleries until April 6