Jeremy Wafer and Sandile Zulu at Michael Stevenson Contemporary
by Paul Edmunds
I wish I could have experienced this exhibition with a clean slate. The material, visual and conceptual connections between the artists' work are so strong that one is tempted to see a closer relationship than really exists. Ignoring all the intellectual baggage that prevents one from making too much of this connection, you can be certain that both artists deal with aspects of incremental change and permutation.
Sandile Zulu's 'Points of the Delta' and Jeremy Wafer's 'Topographies' both present a tight, satisfying aesthetic front. Both employ clearly iterated strategies and although in some places they both end up in similar places, Wafer and Zulu apparently approach their work from opposite sides. Where Wafer delineates, quantifies and categorises subtle, ungraspable phenomena, Zulu's management of organic processes leaves one with the sense that they are just barely restrained, threatening to break the geometry he imposes.
Zulu's Labyrinth of the Elements No. 3 presents a large dirty, ochre field scorch-marked with patterns whose logic just escapes the viewer's grasp. Perhaps there is irony in the fact that the all-over pattern is made on wallpaper, but this is no anodyne background decoration. The patterns evoke the convolutions of a brain as much as celestial phenomena, and together with the title suggests some kind of primeval elemental soup, replete with energy and possibility. The work was produced for the Fritha Langerman-curated 'Lexicons and Labyrinths' exhibition held in conjunction with the Human Genome conference held earlier in the year, in Cape Town.
Accompanying this is the series of 'Delta' works. Here, on either a dark green or dark green-blue background, Zulu has arranged series of triangular foam shapes. Etched by fire and marked with paint, these are arranged in variety of ways. The heraldic form of Insignia of the Delta III evokes a truncated Venus of Willendorf-type figure. This is flanked by two similar constellations ( II and IV) of these triangular forms which, and I suggest this reluctantly, recall turtle-like creatures seen from above. Elsewhere he arranges the forms into star-like shapes. Each seems to be a simple permutation or variation on the other, and each suggests mutability.
The show's title - 'Points of the Delta' - alludes to this idea of origin and change. A 'delta' is characterised by shifting islets formed in flowing water. Deltas are inextricably associated with the origins of civilisation - the Nile Delta, the Delta of the Tigris and Euphrates. Zulu points to the fragility of these origins, the inevitable rise and fall of pockets of civilisation as they proceed into the future, into the human race as we know it (Zulu's allusion to abstraction and the above-mentioned figure as well as the turtle forms make reference to universal creation myths).
I am struck by the potential for change each constellation embodies, the particular combination that has yielded a particular result. Down the length of the room, approaching Insignia of the Delta II -IV are four lines of autumn leaves, neatly raked into shape. Green and white paintmarks make their relation to the wall pieces clear. The geometrical arrangement of organic elements threatens to fall apart in the slightest breeze, yet manages a precarious permanence.
Wafer's Path comprises a grid of 49 landscape format black-and-white photographs. A path traverses each. This path apparently proceeds from the bottom of each vertical row to the top. A slight radial deviation between the paths evokes the curved surface of the earth. It is not clear whether each of the seven rows depicts the same path, but they are at least similar and lit from the same direction. Wafer's photographs somehow make the scale at which we are seeing the path difficult to determine, but I imagine it is a single-track footpath.
The grid suggests a succession of steps, or a collection of views put together to form a single experience. While Wafer assembles a composite he also notes the impossibility or futility of such a task. His device serves both to illuminate and enshroud an experience of walking through the land. The 'Topographies' to which he refers are as much maps of the landscape as they are failures to document the unquantifiable.
The large Isandlwana installation presents us with a large orange-ochre field onto which are stuck apparently random numbers. These turn out to be surveyor's contour measurements. Devoid of their context, Wafer demonstrates how abstract quantities and facts are imposed upon a landscape and serve to describe it in a way devoid of historical and sensual experience.
Three works from Wafer's 1998 Spindle series of ink screenprints are juxtaposed with four sculptures from his new Red Oval series. Similar in profile to the prints, the latter four stand proud of the wall in deep relief, their contours ruptured by grid-like arrangements of variously shaped protrusions. Just like the spindles, these suggest symmetry, variation and possibility. The protrusions make reference to various mark-making traditions, from scarification to Zulu ceramic work, and reflect Wafer's ongoing concern with series and repetition.
There is another sense in which Zulu's and Wafer's work approaches each other. Both invoke the elements - Zulu in his corralling of fire, earth, air and water in the process of his production, and Wafer in the reference made to the land and landscape invoked by his use of oxides and other pigments. However, just as Wafer fixes this element with resin medium, so too does Zulu arrest any further oxidation by the use of some sort of lacquer coating.
It seems, that despite their unconventional concerns, both are happy to accept the conventions of art made for the gallery, and the aesthetic experience engendered by this far-sighted juxtaposition leaves a fortunate viewer all the richer.
Opens: July 23
Closes: August 16
Michael Stevenson Contemporary
Hill House, De Smidt Street, Waterkant, Cape Town
Tel: (021) 421 2575
Email: michael@michaelstevenson.com
Website: www.michaelstevenson.com
Hours: Mon - Fri 9am - 5pm, Sat 10am - 1pm
