FINE ART: Julia Teale
The insularity and complacency of the Cape Town art scene has become a commonplace of South African art journalism. The only solution for artists is often to move northward.
But the last few years have seen the birth and maturation of a number of exhibition spaces, such as The Castle and the Planet Cafe Contemporary Art Site, which could slow this migration. They have cultivated off-beat work that often takes swipes at the more “blockbustery” shows.
The newly opened Labia Gallery, under the curatorship of Gwynneth Harris, is more traditionally Capetonian — elegantly done-up; no-smoking; paintings hanging politely on the walls. Situated on the periphery of the CBD, it has the potential to be one of the most visited galleries in Cape Town. There is even a balsamic-vinegar-and-sun-dried-tomato restaurant and bar next door.
But the opening exhibition of 21 artists does not do enough to distinguish the Labia from the many Cape Town galleries providing a space for art destined for the boardroom or the well-heeled sitting room.
Although the overall selection and hanging of the works seems to be a bit arbitrary, there is an encouraging blend of established artists — Willem Strydom, Gail Caitlin, Andrew Verster — and younger, lesser-known artists such as Reuben Matemane, Johan Louw and Luliette Armstrong.
Still, the strength of the exhibition rests on too few shoulders. Among these are Verster’s Two Interiors, which draw part of their vitality from the painter’s longstanding dialogue with Matisse, combining incisive line and flat, vigorous colour, playing the two formal propositions against one another. These works celebrate the decorative as an ingredient of good painting, and explore its potential as a means for imbuing subject matter with an intensity that is disquieting.
Louw’s desolate, near monochromatic landscape is another example of painting that is both pleasurable and disturbing. The paint that renders the foreground rocks is dragged and pulled across the surface, evoking a kind of fleshiness reminiscent of Lucian Freud’s figure paintings or Clive van den Berg’s pastel landscape drawings.
On a similarly painterly tack, Claire Menck’s small, charged works reflect a mature, sensitive artistic intelligence alive to the constraints and freedoms offered by the limited format.
By contrast, the balance of the work on show seems unfocused and lightweight. A perhaps disproportionate amount of wall- space has been given over to Elaine Jeacock’s large watercolours of largely nude or partly clothed women. The use of watercolour in a large format is both unusual and ambitious, and may bear fruit for this artist in the future. For the moment, though, the rendering of bodies and the quality of paint barely falls within the category of “adequate”.
Even more worrying are the tired seductions of trite metaphors that feature in some of the works — in Woman in a Red Dress, the figure’s splayed legs serve as backdrop to a table decorated with the inevitable split paw-paw.
On the whole, the exhibition is fraught with the problems of assembling such a large body of work in the absense of any clear criteria for selection. The quality of the work is uneven and although there is a largely figurative and painterly emphasis in the show as a whole, the styles and intentions of the works have little to do with one another, little to say to one another and pose few questions about what is going on in painting in South Africa at present.
On the other hand, the forthcoming exhibitions by Verster and Berlin artist Mark Hipper signal that the Labia Gallery can, with a bit of daring, provide a valuable venue for artists and audiences interested in traditions that need not seem uncritical of their defining conventions.
The show runs until September 21