FINE ART: Shaun de Waal
ANDREW VERSTER has been busy. One of South Africa’s best-known and most successful artists, it was his exhibition that opened the new Natal Society of Arts Gallery in Durban in May last year. Then he spent a few weeks at the 1996 Grahamstown festival, as artist in residence, in a studio that the public could visit. He didn’t get much work done.
But Verster made up for that in the works that followed, developing out of and extending the mid-1996 works, exhibiting in Cape Town and now at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg. He has made more than 100 works already this year, and they are works of startling variety.
Which is, in part, what the show is about. Named We Are Bricolage, it glories in the way disparate elements can be amalgamated into one artwork, making wholes out of bits that wouldn’t ordinarily belong together. “The truth,” he says, “is hidden in fragments.”
This new stream in Verster’s work is dominated by fantastical still-lives that centre upon extraordinary vases, almost otherworldly assemblages of heterogeneous things that Verster calls “a kind of arranged marriage – a bit of this, a bit of that. I’ve consciously chosen objects that are alien in their associations, and put them together.”
As he explains, one of these “bastard things”, placed in sumptuously vivid spaces and often juxtaposed with equally bizarre objects, might be made up of decorations from a piece of Royal Doulton china, one of his parents’ wedding gifts, plus the spine and scales of a serpent, topped with a lid based on a temple tower. One vessel sequence has a sculptural touch, with designs concocted from pieces of basketwork or bass-relief attached to the surface and painted over.
A trip to India accompanying a South African dance troupe has, as it were, coloured much of the work on show. Returning with hundreds of photographs, Verster incorporated details into the works at home. But the echoes go both ways, as Verster’s luxuriant colours become patterned sari-cloth and devotional figurines look slightly bewildered to find themselves appearing as Little Buddha in drag. East blurs into West, the old sits alongside the new. These things, as Verster says, are forced into “unlikely conversations” with one another.
Taking the idea further, there is also what Verster describes as “a series of icons with fetish imagery, holy relics, reliquaries, strange goings on, sexual and mystical, sacred and precious, in decorated frames, collaged and painted with stories of their own”. In these works, the images jostle with their frames for attention.
Another series is a set of small portraits. “Imagine you have come across a Guatemalan village and the local photographer has done the people dressed in their best, immortalised for a moment, once and never again, and they are presenting themselves for posterity … Or it could be Umbumbulu or Ahmedabad.”
And then there’s the work set aside in a little curtained alcove, la Bloemfontein City Council. “Erotica,” a sign warns – not for children. At last week’s Mail & Guardian party to say farewell to an old editor and hello to a new one, held at the Goodman Gallery, the space was pretty packed – except for the erotic enclosure, which was empty. Most of those who entered it left again very soon, as if unwilling to be seen in there, especially with the sign outside.
The fact that the works are gay erotica doubtless adds to their dangerousness. Here, Verster’s vases become the descendants of the Greek vessels decorated with copulating couples; male bodies are presented in flagrante delicto, or just displaying their own individual beauty with porn-star insouciance.
What unites these works with the rest of the show is their technique – Verster’s scratching of the line into the wet paint with a darning needle (a way “to draw and paint at the same time”). He calls the method “pre-primary”, a child’s technique, though there is something more childlike in his extravagant colours than in the elegant mastery of his line.
And, interestingly, the erotic works are monochrome, white lines scored out of black, pure drawings. They have this in common with a couple of other, larger works, works which add an edge of unease to an otherwise joyful show. The two that greet the visitor on either side of the gallery’s doorway depict figures caught in awkward positions, one of them trussed uncomfortably, the body twisted as if in extremis.
But that is just one sharp note in a show that celebrates the harmony that can be made of discrete fragments, a sensual acceptance of diversity and difference. Insofar as the work has a message, this is it. As Verster says: “Who we are has yet to be discovered. For the present we are a muddle of influences and sources, of directions and ideals. Anything is possible.”
We Are Bricolage runs at the Goodman Gallery until May 3. A retrospective of Verster’s work opens at the Durban Art Gallery in May