Stephan Erasmus at Gordart
by Robyn Sassen
The rich melodiousness and reduced tonality of Gregorian chant would not feel amiss amidst the extraordinary exhibition of text-based and book art by Master's student, Stephan Erasmus. Entitled 'Requiem for a Cipher', it's an exhibition which meaningfully confronts the notion of readability but also of sincerity and beauty in an artwork.
Influenced by Willem Boshoff, Ian Waldeck and Robbin Silverberg in their use and extrapolation of concrete poetry, Erasmus deals with a range of concepts that feed into the notion of love: love of a muse, love of oneself, love of another. Offering a consideration of Agnosticisim and matriarchal cultures that centralise their worshipping ideals around a dark creative force, the work is able to hinge on everyday emotions, without remaining indebted to them. The work is mature and intelligently executed.
A series of pristinely monochromatic works adorns the gallery space. Some pieces have messages encrypted within, others play with the notion and physical activity of paging through a book. Erasmus quotes sources ranging from Shakespeare's sonnets to the ambiguous sexuality in the Song of Solomon. He appropriates text from Romeo and Juliet, but also selected chapters of Dickens' Great Expectations.
Playing with the values of bookmaking and book arts, he has produced a series of artists' books robust enough to be handled by the public. They're largely text-less or text-light books, exciting in their scientific and technical understanding of the medium and how it lends itself to push and pull in terms of folding paper, drawing with string or manipulating proportions.
Not without a whiff of the type of mental games articulated by artists like John Cage or Marcel Duchamp, the work is clever and beguiling, and it references a rich range of language habits and patterns. These include references to Braille as well as dance culture and anagrams. Erasmus cites Kahlil Gibran alongside Nick Cave in extrapolating his sources, his influences and the literature which has moved him.
The pièce de resistance is a work entitled Altar. Situated in one of gallery rooms off the central space, it is a majestically quiet work, offset by a spotlight, which projects its shadow onto the wall. Altar comprises hundreds of matchsticks linked to one another like a DNA molecule. Each bears the name of an 'ism' written carefully on its four sides.
Erasmus frames these: 'Each 'ism' represents a way of being, a way of seeing'. Each is irrevocably connected to another. If one were to be removed, the structure would be impaired or destroyed. It's a comment on how these 'isms' of belief structures feed into human thought behaviour and identity construction. It is the opposites in particular that are forced to lie alongside one another, offering one another support, and indeed, counterposition.
Altar is the piece on the show from which many of the lesser works logically grow. A consideration of the exhibition in its entirety as an anthology of love letters, however, puts a spin on work which in turn refers back to Altar. Many of the works are less about love than hate, or loss or sorrow. Many of the works are love letters to an abstract muse, or a god, but are encrypted, and thus balanced by a sense of puzzlement and obscurity.
The puzzles in these works are carefully constructed: some provide their own keys, others don't. They follow the form of word puzzles, but none of them are flippant or easy. Whether you 'get it' or don't is broadly immaterial to the appreciation of the work, but there remains something hidden, which is alluring. Like Altar the complexity is about how oppositions are necessary for the generation of succinct ideological positioning.
2004 Ampersand fellow Erasmus names Philosophy, Metaphysics, Spirituality and Book Arts among his interests. These balance the obsessive artmaking for which he is developing a reputation. Such interests clearly they feed this artist's identity, and they represent the flipside of an artist who shows delight in language, who is intent in its use and meaning, and convinced of the value of beauty in art.
This show is both beautiful and meaningful, in terms of craft but also in terms of refinement and concretisation of thought processes. Erasmus is certainly an artist to watch.
Closed: March 24
Gordart Gallery
78 Third Avenue, Melville, Johannesburg
Tel: (011) 726 8519 or 084 423 8635
Email: gordon@gordart.co.za
Hours: Wed - Sat 10.30am - 6pm
