Liese van der Watt On show in Johannesburg
Barricaded Bryanston seems a fitting backdrop for the first South African exhibition of expatriate Philip Badenhorst, who has been living, working and teaching in Antwerp for the last 21 years. His is an unfamiliar aesthetic – European perhaps – in its detached refusal to engage the exterior world, an indulgence that a viewer used to South Africa’s overtly-committal art does not expect.
The works on the walls of the Karen McKerron Gallery have titles like Impermanence, Lightness, Illuminations and Duo sphere, invoking a world of Eastern spiritual, and specifically Buddhist influences.
Badenhorst turned to the theme of Mapping the Interior after reading Sogyal Rinpoche’s The Tibetan Book of the Living and the Dying in 1995 during a sojourn in the Karoo town of Prince Albert, close to Colesberg where he grew up.
The intersection of spiritual awakening and the place in which he found himself seems to have been particularly meaningful – the one experience provided a metaphor for the other as spiritual revival mirrored not only the meditative process of art making, but also the artist’s search for his African origins.
What could so easily have been an opportunistic assertion of African identity through the appropriation of trite ethnic symbols, is merely a subtle and tentative acknowledgement of African ancestry in Badenhorst’s works.
In works dealing with this theme, he has used the image of branches to signify not only the family tree and the idea of lineage, but through a repeated window- like illumination of the centre of the work, he points to the importance of self-discovery and inner vision in the spiritual journey.
This journey, as Badenhorst conceptualises it, is one of gradual evolution towards wholeness and balance, a point symbolised by the image of a perfectly symmetrical vessel. The journey is always in reverse, back towards the origin, the void, the place which is, as he puts it, before words and thoughts.
Ovos balances two perfectly rendered eggs in the illuminated centre of the work, Ab Oro places a vessel within the egg within the illuminated centre, suggesting the ultimate origin in perfect wholeness. The eggs, the tree and the vessel are perhaps over-familiar symbols indicative of a somewhat exhausted vocabulary, but it is the perfect integration of content and symbol with technique and form that makes this exhibition as a whole so seductive.
Badenhorst uses a limited range of monochrome colours which he washes into the canvas in repeated glazes. These he sands down almost obsessively, resulting in layers and layers of thin pigment – a technique that allows the undercolours a rare luminosity that seems to come from behind or within the canvas.
This luminosity, as well as the contemplative, stilled mood that these works exude, are reminiscent of the work of Mark Rothko, but it is the serene simplicity of Italian artist Giorgio Morandi that best captures the mood of the most striking works on this show – making a few larger and brighter works seem rather disruptive of the whole.
But more than mere technique, the act of art making becomes the act of meditation, the journey inwards. These works map the interior, not only in “self-portraits” of the internal organs and emotions, but through the exteriorisation of an intricate artistic process. The journey within has become the journey without.
Phillip Badenhorst’s Mapping the Interior is on show at the Karen McKerron Gallery, 74 Mandeville Road, Bryanston and ends August 26