FINE ART: Suzy Bell
HOW many white middle class males in their 50s living in a retirement village – “where no-one buys art” – are painting berry- brown, sherry-brown bodies to inspire a sensual dialogue in post-apartheid South Africa? Well, Terrence Patrick is one. This artist does not simply yearn for reconciliation but for a Versoening (reconciliation), based on sensuality. So Patrick reveals black people as beautiful, and as “sensual beings”.
He paints black nudes surrounded by pasty- faced males; curious onlookers with black marble eyes. So Monet’s Olympia goes black; while an onlooker, a white priest, calmly sips his Earl Grey tea. He watches; she reflects.
A recent painting, The Source, is about such sexuality. Because Patrick feels it’s time we reinvented our symbolic mother. So he confronts this issue in a populist way through cartoonish images smacking of Beryl Cooke’s rosy-cheeked caricatures, with the men very much Doubting Thomases.
Patrick also paints the open palm and uses the symbol of money as he feels that’s what’s being offered to lure black people into the system. “Money is the peace offering. So we reveal our world of money and we let you into it. So we have this juggling of values between the psychological framework of Western man against tribal Africa. No wonder we’re all so confused.”
Art, for Patrick, is confronting the significance of the new. He wants to reveal different emotional states in one painting – the confusion and the seduction. He admits he doesn’t expect to earn money from his current exhibition. “But I’m very fluent at the moment. I’ve searched inside for many years for what I want to say. It’s very rewarding.”
Die Versoening is on at Pietermaritzburg’s Tatham Art Gallery until February 23. It shares the space with works by Reshada Crouse