Chris Roper On show in Cape Town
Their name makes me think of some kind of League of Super Heroes, and I picture them in tights and colourful costumes, ta-dahing off into the lurid sunset in pursuit of their evil nemesis, Bad Taste Man. A ridiculous fantasy, brought on by the early hour at which I have to interview them, and also by the strange evocative power that a named collective wields.
My fantasy isn’t totally wrong. One of them is wearing tights, but that’s okay because they’re all women: Mary Visser, Thelma Mort, Jenny Parsons and Diana Page. And when I visit their show at the Irma Stern Museum, I’m tempted for a moment to see the gorgeously colourful paintings as their costumes, or the outward expression of their collective ethos.
They describe that ethos by explaining their name: “Boudoir Biscuits are very contemporary, and a very South African product. Also we’ve become infamous for our tea parties. We wanted to give ourselves a name that said something about ourselves as artists, but that was also light, and South African, and contemporary, and crunchy. Boudoir Biscuits is a South African childhood memory, it’s granny’s trifles, it’s racing cars with jelly tots on top at children’s parties.”
The Irma Stern Museum is a beautiful space, strangely redolent of order and symmetry despite Stern’s wild works. Because of this, and because of the unifying power of the idea of a group, the eye attempts to impose order and classification on the Biscuits’ show. At first, I try and trace thematic similarities in their work. Love of landscape, and extremely bright visions of the architectural peculiarities of South Africa.
Then I try and isolate each artist’s speciality. I know it’s a naff thing to do, but the riot of colour and liquid shapes is very difficult to assimilate. I imagine Victorian eyes forcing the same sort of artificial order when first encountering the South African landscape. It appears that Visser is intrigued by cityscapes, Parsons by nature, Mort by structures, Page by people. Closer perusal reveals them totally resistant to such mundane generalities, and it becomes obvious that they have achieved that difficult synthesis of individualistic styles and shared vision, without easy sacrifice to either element.
Visser’s Blue City is a lovely, slashing, almost impressionistic view of what could be Cape Town. I notice another painting called Jazz City, but it turns out to be by Diana Page, so bang goes that classificatory device. Parsons’ Trees series are wonderfully whimsical. Lumpy trees cuddling, forming a laager or a chat circle, in Trees III huddling around a big, comforting tree. The trees have lovely shadows like thoughts bleeding away.
Parsons has an eerie feel for shadows and light: a painting of Newlands Canal has water and shadows as part of the same movement, as if light and water were the same substance. In Page’s Chicken Man, a man holds aloft a chicken, as if for a sacrifice. The mass of chicken is so fleshly that you don’t even notice the feathers. It looks like liquid fat, and you can almost taste it.
Another painting that has the same visceral effect on me is Mort’s Smitswinkelbaai, which shows a featureless, hulking and round- shouldered man holding on to a floating inner tube on which a little girl is hanging. Painted from an elevated perspective, the picture is imbued with a power dynamic that echoes the sacrificial aura of Page’s Chicken Man. By this stage I’ve given up trying to isolate similarities or differences, and I’m reminded of what the Biscuits say about attempts to type them.
“We’ve become aware how quickly women artists become stereotyped. When we say we’re teachers, suddenly you’re teachers who paint in your spare time. Or if we say we have these serious crits about our artworks, but we have them during these glorious, over the top, very noisy tea parties, suddenly you’re not being serious about your art.
“Women do have different ways of relating and doing things, and we embrace that very fun, joyous way of doing things.” The Biscuits claim that “one common thread among us is that we’re passionate about paint. We all absolutely adore paint.” When you leave this show, you’ve experienced that passion.
Boudoir Biscuits is on at the Irma Stern Museum, Cecil Rd, Rosebank. Tel: 685-5686.