Archive: Issue No. 75, November 2003

"And the little that is known about it has not yet all been said. Much has been said, but not all." (Samuel Beckett, Watt)

Samuel Beckett may literally have been pasted into the works on Colin Richards' recent show, but it was also a Beckett-like sense of anticipation and stasis that prevailed in this exhibition, unassumingly installed in the small, white-walled space of art on paper. The choice of venue was secluded and intimate, the works lining the walls uncomfortable, almost incidental. The atmosphere too was quiet and modest, everything designed to understate the significance of the works on show.

The untitled exhibition consisted a selection of finely detailed drawings, watercolours, collages, and prints, all framed in white. Two small bronze casts complemented these: one of a stone (that was also depicted in a watercolour), the other of a book. The show was rounded-off with an obsessive mixed-media piece, in which the artist cut words from a found book of South African statutes and reassembled them in such a way as to reveal the violent undercurrents of the language used.

Immediately striking was the level of labour involved in the processes: the obsessive cutting and pasting, the intensely worked surfaces of his grey drawings, and the dense, dark watercolours. The drawings sucked you into a world of grey lines, with stones, sculls, headstones and small dead birds often placed symmetrically or floating uneasily on the page. The mark-making technique, as well as the very human scale of the works suggested the engagement of the artist on a physical level. This trace added to the gentle intimacy of the drawings. Exploring many of the artist's previous concerns, the show included new studies of the Veronica Veil, from his 'Veronica' series.

As much as the works were visually seductive they were also intellectually engaging. Richards plays on language and text, setting up internal vocabularies of shared signs and symbols from image to image, sometimes accessible through literature, history, or religion, and sometimes entirely private. His works are littered with visual puns, as in his bronze cast The first stone, a stone picked up on Melville Koppie.

Because of the intense inter-referential nature of the iconography, and processes it was very difficult to imagine them existing outside of their relation with each other. The works were often difficult to access, each of the pieces exhibited seemingly linked to other works by whispered conversations and in-jokes, something that came to me as I moved around the space.

These levels of reference connect not only the images, but also the text attached to them, and the linguistic qualities they illustrate. In this respect, Richards once remarked (on ArtThrob) that: "Illustration is a hinge between the linguistic and the visual, and it can turn many ways".

In my view, the most appealing element of this show was contained in the way Richards layered his meaning, in each individual work as well as in the show as a whole. This made for engaging viewing, the works accessible on many different levels, their meaning continually shifting, always eluding complete understanding.

October 11 - 30