In Lars von Trier’s recent film, Antichrist, nature is presented as “Satan’s church,” a relentlessly cruel, profoundly indifferent monster.
As the speaking fox in the film warns, ‘chaos reigns.” Deborah Poynton evokes similar themes in her new exhibition In Arcadia. Turning away from the portraits and interiors that dominate her earlier work, Poynton presents an installation of large paintings that leads her viewer outside, into a liminal, overgrown landscape, a place of both annihilation and creation, beauty and terror. Like von Trier’s film, the exhibition offers a profound challenge to the ‘tree-hugging brand” ecological art that preaches the illusory seduction of a return to mother earth that never existed in the first place. As Poynton explains, ‘For man, to behold the world is to reduce or even destroy it, perhaps because it is otherwise too frightening, too empty of significance, and simultaneously too full of detail to comprehend.”
Michael Stevenson Gallery, Ground floor, Buchanan Building, 160 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock, Cape Town, until March 21.