FINE ART: Julia Teale
JOHAN LOUW’S first solo show, An Exhibition of Oil Paintings, shows the work of a young artist determined to get to grips with painting. The work, consisting of near- monochromatic paintings-with-figures, a few landscapes and a couple of drawn cont (French chalk) heads, is compelling: one is drawn in, captivated.
The whole manner of the exhibition is rough- hewn – there is a general disregard for conventional ideas of finish and aestheticising detail. The paintings, mostly on board, are without frames: mutton dressed up as mutton, each painting forced to fight its own battle with the viewer, and they do this supremely well.
The paintings, taken individually, have an internal momentum and a feverishness in their execution and conception that establishes a set of pictorial priorities: the eye is caught by and made to struggle through the knotted, pitted, viscous paint that describes the flesh and clothing of bulky, leaden men blundering in and out of the vacant, nowhere spaces they half-occupy. In the most successful of these paintings the space in which the figures are set evokes the disturbed apprehension of environment that one experiences on the edge of sleep.
But the somnambulism towards which the paintings teeter is not rewarded by rest – the viewer is pulled back by the agitated surfaces of flesh and garment and the silent anguish that the painter has drawn out of his nameless but naggingly familiar subjects. Louw’s sources for these figures are disparate, often garnered from newspapers and magazines, blurred references to those who wield power indiscriminately and, occasionally, to those who may be its victims. There is not much in the space that surrounds these bruised figures to confer any especially meaningful context of action: at best, a vague urban skyline that could as easily be a line of drinks on a bar counter.
They are similar to the species of male imaged in the work of Robert Hodgins and William Kentridge, placing Louw squarely in the current of South African art that draws on the menacing quality of the brutal power- mongering that has informed so much of our history.
Markedly absent, however, are the supporting cast of desks, telephones, guns, cars, and boardrooms one associates with such characters. The sheer authority of the paint brings these ”un-people” into focus and materialises their presence, physically and psychologically.
Louw’s achievement is evidently hard-won. No shortcuts are taken to lend the images an easy grace. At times the gritty toughness of the painting comes undone and becomes clumsy, an incoherent array of marks that fragment the forms they intend to describe.
The artist’s impatience with the intractable nature of the medium is evident in the way he will, without compunction, blot out a part of a figure with rough scrubbed-on paint: these lacunae are somehow made to feed into the internal momentum of the painting. That the painter has learnt something from the work of painters like Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach is evident in the quality of mark and surface, but rather than resorting to simple- minded appropriation, Louw subsumes these potentially overpowering influences within his own expressive idiom.
All in all, this powerful and coherent exhibition shows that Johann Louw is a dedicated painter, unlikely to give in to successful formulae and driven by a rigorous engagement with the medium that promises to continue to develop in intensity and vision.
An Exhibition of Oil Paintings by Johan Louw is at the Association for Visual Arts, Cape Town.