If you begin at the spatial beginning of Joni Brenner’s Off the Wall (in the entrance, adjunct to the vast gallery space), you begin with two works that are small and strong. Chip off the Old Block and Recollect – Reconnect each use as their material and visual inspiration two worn postcard images of Rodin’s sculpture La Pensee, from the Musee de Luxembourg.
Chip off the Old Block playfully and lovingly describes that chip, which Brenner has made of plaster of paris, wax and marble dust. Mounted together on a shelf, postcard and work sit in an odd dimensional relationship -the flat card full of pathos and the elsewhere, the “chip” a sensuous, present thing masquerading as a relic, lovely to behold.
In Recollect – Reconnect, another postcard of the same work accompanies two oil-on-canvas paintings on the collective shelf. The oil is thick, textured, softly pastelled, incredibly evocative, despite its very different substance, of the medium and lines of Rodin’s sculptural portrait. Two elements crucial to Brenner’s work are introduced here. One is her playful sense of loving irony regarding media, art history and viewer expectations; the other is her passionate application of this irony to the genre of portraiture. The intimate invitation of these two small works feels promising, like the beginning of a journey into something special, optimistic, clever.
The work in the vaulted, high-ceilinged main gallery opens up this perception, lifts and drops it into a dizzying fall of ambivalence. Brenner has used this difficult space impeccably, confronting viewers with works of monumental scale and dazzling softness.
Muted portraits in a variety of media – photocopy, wax, acrylic, oil, watercolour – hang off the walls, mounted in huge box frames. In the centre of the space, cutting it diagonally with its imposing monumentality is Irresolute: Wall-painting, originally a watercolour which Brenner has photocopied, enlarged to an enormous scale, and worked with wax, acrylic, and watercolour again. It is another softly scarred “portrait”, an impression of a face that seems embalmed, falling in on itself with a residual sense of life’s griefs.
And finally, beyond this space of softly receding heads is a smaller, dark space in which Brenner mounts more aggressive works: thick and luscious oils that, in their flirt with abstract expressionism, subvert the specifities of their titles. A soft grey cushion which bears a roughly moulded, roundly protruding belly, is mounted, like a jewel, in a perspex case. At the back, against the wall, is a series of watercolours masquerading as x-rays, lit from beneath in museological boxes.
Brenner’s fascination with the masquerade, with the multiple layers and dimensions of her media, is what seems to drive this exhibition, making it an accomplished inquiry into the formal possibilities, meanings, slippages, and treacheries of production. Its presentation is impeccable: to a greater extent than the title suggests, Off the Wall is perfectly serious about the frame as an integral part of the work. This, I think, is both the strength of the exhibition, and its downfall. Brenner’s formal point is well made, but the aesthetic and imaginative possibility of the works is absorbed by their very self- conscious staging, which in turn rests on a clinical concept.
Imagined apart from their pristine shelves and butch frames, the works bleed, without protest, out of the mind’s eye.
The exhibition is on at the Sandton Civic Gallery until May 29