Archive: Issue No. 75, November 2003

The perusal of the African landscape by the colonising eye of the traveller and then the settler has a long history. From Le Vaillant to Burchell, from Baines to Pierneef, the white men came with an eye to acquiring/ occupying the land. Seeing it through a western lens they romanticised the open spaces and obliterated the presence of the indigenous population. Recent Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee's collection of essays in White Writing cogently engages both the writer's and visual artists' representation of land and the attendant tendency to reinvent it according to their own needs.

Thus when we approach the current exhibition of paintings by Aidan Walsh and Lize Hugo depicting their 5000km tour from Cape Town through the Karoo, 'Pofadder and Back', on at the NSA, it behoves us to remember it as a journey taken by latter-day settlers. A personalised affair - with a bias towards the low key, the incidental and the neglected rather than the more prominent notations of history - it nonetheless reflects the colonising process.

Presented in the tradition of a naturalism made popular in South Africa by Walter Meyer and dependent on acuity of visual detail for its impact, Walsh and Hugo both exhibit a reassuring technical competence in their medium and a remarkable similarity in approach.

Surprisingly they both deny any mutual influence having worked on the production of this show, not only in separate studios, but also in separate cities - Hugo in Cape Town and Walsh in Durban. The paintings, however bear similarities in scale, compositional form and conditions of light and it is up to the observant viewer to linger a little longer over the details to pick up the differences.

Both artists have their fair share of the almost formulaic picturesque dorps seen en route with their veranda houses, corrugated iron roofs, dusty roads and cloudless deep blue skies (and in relation to skies it appears that Walsh may have succumbed to settling for a technique which works but on occasion becomes a little mechanical). Hugo's work appears slightly rougher, warmer of palette and more peopled than Walsh's.

Her concerns seem more rooted in a contemporary enjoyment of what she sees and are, perhaps as a consequence, more anecdotal - men going to work in the back of a bakkie and the painted ornamental figures seen decorating a stoep. Sometimes the paintings even come with a touch of humour as in her Glorifying the Dorper, an iconic depiction of a monument to sheep.

Walsh's work seems slightly more anxious than Hugo's. If Baines and Burchell saw the hinterland as mainly devoid of occupants then so too does Walsh, who never engages directly with the human form in his paintings. Baines and Burchell, however, saw with a settler's eye a land promising occupation while Walsh seems to be looking down the other end of the same telescope. Here is a settlers' land devoid of its inhabitants. All their artefacts remain, but for how long?

Tinged with nostalgia the work seems less about memory than a reflection on the current vacating of this land by that very settler. Those who remain cling tenaciously to what their forebears laid down, but retreat into the shade. In Niewoudtville, a landscape where a whitened church stands out, isolated and spare against a greying sky, the endeavour of settlement is starkly presented.

In Pofadder Hotel a shadow slicks its way across the pavement and up the closed front door of the hotel, hinting at the coolness within, a place of retreat and withdrawal. Depopulated, the land is quiet, the clarity of its rendition disturbing rather than assuring.

One of the most interesting images on the show, A Saint's Tomb, Signal Hill, presents a domed building seen almost entirely in the shade of its own shadow, a few glittering highlights catching detail and a light pink path meandering away from it. Slightly hallucinogenic or dreamlike it seems to speak of another time and, like much of Walsh's work, of the fragile transience of the settlers' presence in this land.

September 30 - October 19