Chris Roper On show in Cape Town
The listing for this exhibition in the Mail & Guardian last week read ”Four Durban artists”, without their names. It’s a space-saving ploy, but it also says a lot about the way we Capetonians conceptualise the foreigners in our midst, as if they’re some kind of homogeneous group determined by their geography.
The title of the exhibition, 30S X 31E (the co-ordinates for Durbs), also prompts you to think about the artworks in terms of where they come from.
On the opening night, the speech is by Mike van Graan. It’s a strange speech, all about the divide that exists between Cape Town and Durban, about how deluded some Capies are about their supposed safe existence, and it also presents an image of Durban as hot and exotic.
After the speech, when I look at the works on display, I almost feel compelled to read them as specific to a certain (doubtless artificial) idea I have about what Durban is like. So Aidan Walsh’s oil paintings of landscapes, houses, crypts and statues appeal to me in different ways.
While all are aesthetically valuable, the series of South African locations, like Empangeni, Deserted House, strikes one as quintessential. Colesberg, with its familiar scene of white house with green roof on a tar road, kopje behind and bright red stop sign in the left foreground, seems hauntingly familiar, and it is suffused with an amazing light that reminds you of those Karoo mornings that you didn’t notice at the time.
The other series of paintings, like details from the Basilica de Saint Denis, seem less satisfying – a mistaken impression which a second visit, free of the over-determining effect of Van Graan’s powerful speech, corrects. Bronwen Findlay’s screenprints and lithographs seem to deal with colour before they deal with form.
Kingfisher is perhaps the exemplar, blue and orange birds haphazardly clustered together. Or perhaps Lizard on leopard-skin cloth, a bright green lizard with red eyes crawling across a red and blue leopard skin. Other articles depicted are a sock, hand, flowers, a handbag and more birds.
A second look reveals the lavish attention paid to the line and shape – the bright colour is the bait to drag you into contemplation. Jeremy Wafer’s Spindle Series screenprints, consisting of variations on a black spindle shape set against a light background, are evocative and beautiful.
They demand that the viewer inject some creativity into the viewing process, and refuse to be simply abstract representations. The marginal variations seem to mimic the act of perception, and if you wanted to you could see holes in a white foreground.
David Haigh’s clay works are also variations on a basic shape. Once you have studied them for a while, though, their effect is to make you realise that the concept of a ”basic shape” is ridiculous. All are different and unique, and seem to owe nothing to some original template.
Shield-like shapes, or tortoise shells, all untitled and all with oddly placed holes and spikes.
You would want to see them as martial, sexual or heraldic, but eventually you yearn to just touch them.
There are many ways that you could enjoy these works.
Reading them against each other adds new facets of appreciation, while looking at them in isolation brings a different kind of experience. Seeing them as peculiarly of Durban is also valuable, as long as you also admire the reach and depth of their representations.
30S x 31E, the works of four Durban artists: Aidan Walsh, Jeremy Wafer, Bronwen Findlay and David Haigh are on exhibition at the Lipschitz Gallery, 138 Buitengracht St, Cape Town. Tel: 22-0280.