Garth Doyle’s sculptures are smooth combinations of gorgeous shapes. One group may be a set of wave-buffed bone, another a white fashion snack tooth-picked by reflective green Perspex. In each work — whether the sensuous soft-boiled eggs or the hand-operated sex toy — elements of the diverse pursuits of their maker emerge. It is the designer combination of architecture, product specifications, vehicle lines and graphic-novel fantasy that makes the slow-travelling toaster, with fin, so clearly delightful.
Doyle writes that his pieces are ‘the result of swing”, an influence held out by the exhibition title: Syncopations, a jazz term defined as ‘displacing — so that strong beats become weak and vice versa”. The choice of this name makes partial sense in that the artist may have been listening to jazz while making the work, an interest reflected in the compositions’ physical cadence.
But mainly they are fun, non- functional objects, fun because of the joy that comes from something really well made, and because of Doyle’s sense of absurdity. This functions best in a series where scaled human figures give greatness to the work. Here, he creates a series of quirky scenarios. Stimulating interest and inquiry, fabricating stories, they’re like absurd little neighbourhood excitements where overnight, for example, a thing lands outside.
But, because I like a bit of interactive depth, less interesting are his beautiful objects presented figureless, on their own.
Luan Nel also creates work of miniature plastic figurines. But unlike the animated dialogue Doyle creates, Nel’s bodies seem emotionally suspended in time. Lit sharply from one side, they cast shadows many times longer than the heights they reflect. It is these that give that eeriness: moving shadows are ominous, stationary ones even more chilling.
Framed in white boxes and placed on expansive white board, figurines, in infinite isolation, are suspended indefinitely. With Doyle, the viewer needs to go up close to see the interactions within the work; with Nel, the viewer converses directly with the sculptures, egged on by the voyeurist view from above. While Doyle’s may be a soap-opera cliffhanger, Nel’s seems a terrifyingly inevitable reality.
It is the innocuousness of Nel’s scenes that create, even further, a sense of foreboding: no water in sight but disaster may soon strike the bathers; the wedding couple’s disputed bliss. These for me are the strongest works on show.
Less so are his digital images of the diminutive figures printed full human size. While the tiny bodies in his sculptures are suspended in poetry, the blown-up figures are too rigid, too fixed. Also, gone are their shadows and with that their feeling.
Syncopations: Garth Doyle at The Premises Gallery and New Redruth: Luan Nel at Art on Paper in Johannesburg are both running until June 3