Master painter Johann Louw could easily be mistaken for the farmer type. He’s clad in fatigues, his wavy brown hair in a bushy mane. At least that’s how he appears in most photographs. Actually, he grew up in Bellville, Cape Town and for what it’s worth, Louw had the bourgeois pleasure of studying art at school which he pursued further at the University of Stellenbosch. He earned his masters degree in 1992.
A mid-career exhibition reflecting the past two decades of his work is now on at the Salaam Art Gallery in Stellenbosch till 13 June. The show is on a third and final stop-over after touring through Tshwane and Bloemfontein. Louw’s exhibition includes drawings, painting and graphics. The work gives form to a “particular psychological spirit of place and time” that characterises South African society, says the accompanying catalogue.
Louw’s images are sombre and dark. He restricts his colours to near grays, and ochre: generally monochromatic shades. This is in keeping with the apparent darkness of his themes. He’s not hung up with the polite pursuit of the beautiful. Rather he seems to focus on the implicit violence of separation and aloneness. This he achieves by occasionally placing compositionally unrelated figures in confrontation with each other, or even their surroundings. Though on the same canvas, his figures tend to remain alone in different picture planes or even realities, as in his 2005 series of figure studies.
A diptych oil on canvas titled Gedagtig aan Courbet (in memory of Courbet) (2005) explores the tension between race, gender and the landscape. The painting has a half naked male (possibly Black or Colored) and a nude white female figure sharing the canvas plane. The figures’ co-existence appears to be unresolved; they both seem to be standing outside a landscape that itself resists them. The female figure is placed further into limbo by a grey framing device that separates and isolates her from the “bigger picture” of the painting.
By exploring the viscosity of paint, he models and sculpts it to resemble human flesh as close as painterly possible, however allowing “paint to stay paint”; A method that evokes the English painter Lucian Freud and perhaps correctly so. Only, unlike Freud, Louw’s gloomy appeal seems to suggest his subjects’ susceptibility to death and decay, the fate of all that lives. But more fundamentally Louw does not attempt to capture the exact likeness of his subject. He aims to create anonymous persons “more symbolic of society or its fragments”. Plus his “love of the Expressionist tradition” further distinguishes him from Freud.
Of his place of upbringing Louw says it was a “white male-orientated” society where male values of self-assertion were “paramount throughout”. He adds that everything else was viewed as “Other… and to be bent by male power to compliance”. Perhaps this explains the uneasy male-female archetypes in his work. His male figures have a stronger sense of physical presence than the female figures. Though they too don’t return a confident gaze they are partially — and on some occasions fully-clothed in “work clothing, the only clothing there is”. Is Louw subverting or reinforcing the patriarchal idea of the male as “essential worker”? It’s up to the viewer to decide.
On the other hand, he denudes his female figures. Totally. They are vulnerable: overwhelmed by the elements. He imbues them with an aura of shame and the opposite of assertiveness. Andries Gouws writing in the catalogue observes that these women are “naked without being seductive”. He further suggests that their sexuality functions as a “possibility of rape, coupling or possession, not that of pleasure or love”. Feminist readings are not on record.
The drawings and graphics included in the exhibition were mostly created in 2006. They are a series of portrait studies rendered in charcoal. Louw’s “love of mark making” is indulged here. He experiments with textures and moods similar to those of the paintings from his monochromatic period. They are presented along with a series of lithographs that explore the same creative concerns.
By covering work from his student days in the early 1990s to that produced around 2006, the show provides a clear sense of the trajectory of Louw’s creative and ideological make-up.