Alex Sudheim: On show in Durban
‘I do not care about fashion, only about permanencies,” proclaims neo-modernist Jeanette Winterson, tireless defender of the timeless, transcendent nature of great art. A point of view which has been heavily denigrated with the establishment of postmodernism’s hypercriticality.
“What is certain is that pictures and poetry and music are not only marks in time but marks through time, of their own time and ours, not antique or historical, but living as they always did: exuberantly, untired.”
It is with this philosophy that painter Candace Charlton allies herself, striving in her work to capture a sense of inner beauty that would be as easily recognisable to someone back in the 12th century as to someone in the 22nd. Gladly admitting to being a “traditional” artist in the context of today’s theoretical climate, she isolates herself for months in a small cottage, painting quietly resonant and haunting images of women.
As I would imagine most real artists to be, Charlton is humble and unpretentious, referring to her labours merely as “a route to other worlds.” She paints almost directly from the unconscious, beginning each piece with no preconceived idea of how it is going to develop or be resolved. She takes the risk of staking everything upon whatever moods or epiphanies might lurk below the surface of her mind.
It is this methodology that lends her paintings of women their magnetic and otherworldly charm. Each piece depicts not an actual woman, but a composite of randomly configured memories.
When confronted with the knowledge that the serene, spectral beauty in Magenta Cloak does not really exist, it somehow creates a subtly disturbing thrill. For she is a myth and a dream, despite looking so achingly real.
She paints like this because she sees her work not as an end in itself, but as a vehicle for a greater narrative: “I want to tell a story, not just show a person,” she says, adding with a novelist’s grasp of texture, “often it’s not what’s in the painting that matters, but what’s not.”
The truth of this becomes apparent when absorbing oneself in works such as Magenta Cloak or Waiting III (For Chopin) – their power to move lies not in what they represent on the canvas, but what they manage to evoke and suggest outside their physicality.
Though Charlton’s works may be described as beautiful, they are so in a manner that is not functional or decorative, but one that is honest and personal. There are classical references to Ingres and Alma Tadema and Charlton’s love of abstract expressionists such as Mark Rothko is also evident with the background disintegrations of the Phoenix Diptych and Passive Warrior II (Matador).
And while Charlton might not be the latest news on the conceptual art scene, her paintings work on a level of simple beauty that instinctively trigger the deep, invisible rumblings of awe and mystery common to every human being.