Adriaan van Zyl - Paintings
by Claire Wolf Krantz
This piece by visiting American artist and critic Claire Wolf Krantz was written earlier this year after a visit to the artist's studio
In his recent paintings, Adriaan van Zyl deviates from his earlier fascination with a South African landscape that is seemingly devoid of people. He now introduces a complex urban setting: paintings of the Tygerberg Hospital complex. His works are highly realistic, yet they differ from the photographs he uses as source material by means of their evocative colour relationships and carefully worked surfaces. Tygerberg Hospital is not a fancy, private hospital. It is huge, all business, spare, and industrial looking. Although this setting does not convey comfort, it does express substantiality, seriousness and capability. Van Zyl shot his photographs here before and during his hospitalisation and recovery from a serious illness.
A favourite painting is Hospital Triptych(2004), in which the artist depicts the brownish orange brick buildings of the Tygerberg complex. The left and right sides of this tritypch are views of the buildings from different places: The right-hand picture is of one massive block of buildings with several courtyards. Crossing in front of them is a walkway, presumably leading to even more impersonal, impenetrable structures. The left side is a long shot shown in sharp perspective. Offsetting this massive complex, van Zyl's hospital room can be seen in the centre section. Dominated by the bed, it is painted predominantly in blue-greens - the colour generally associated with hospitals and surgery - which counterbalance the browns and oranges of the buildings' exteriors.
Replacing the paintings of flowers, fruit, and dead birds ordinarily associated with still lifes, other current paintings such as Hospital Still Life I and Theatre Still Life II depict the cold reality of the instruments used for diagnosis and treatment, themselves often deadly in the pain they produce. The cabinets in which they are housed, as well as the objects that the patient can see before surgery, are painted from odd angles, with hard precision. Van Zyl's streamlined furniture, his privacy curtain - all the accoutrements of a typical, no-frills hospital - are lethal. His paintings of these objects in the hospital setting are beautiful, but the objects and scenes he paints are disturbing.
Works such as The Recovery Room and Hospital Arrival show beds or carts that are spare and unwelcoming. Yet in others, van Zyl's diptychs and triptychs juxtapose images of his hospital bed with those of the ocean. Hospital Diptych, for example, portrays his room, tranquil and orderly, next to a raging sea. In this work, van Zyl seems to suggest that while his environment and persona are calm and workmanlike, his inner reality is in uproar.
In the left-hand panel of The Night Before, van Zyl painted his room in darkness. Next to it, the right hand panel of an orange sun setting over a city is probably the view from his hospital room. While the gloomy dimness of these images implies the approach of night, suggesting the end of day - or of life, there are small spots of light and hope pictured by the lamp shining over the bed on the left, and the remainders of the sun reflecting off the windowsill of his room on the right.
In these hospital pieces, van Zyl conveys powerful emotions, of the fear and dread associated with serious illness, of being trapped in a large institution, and of feeling invisible in an atmosphere of anonymity. He communicates a powerful sense of the reality of illness, of pain, of helplessness in the face of a large organisational structure. Yet within these desolate structures, these engines of healing, lies salvation, more clearly indicated in other pieces juxtaposing interiors and exteriors of the buildings with the sea. In Hospital Diptych II, in browns and beiges, he paints a waiting room in the hospital next to a panel of a more welcoming sea, revealing mixed emotions.
In the dim, unremarkable room on the left, one waits to see what the future holds, while on the right, the surf pounding on the beach elicits a number of interpretations. Here, van Zyl's notable ambiguity is most evident: what does the sea mean? Freedom? Drowning? Swimming as exercise and recreation? Does nature's power threaten the efficacy of what these hospital buildings stand for: the most extreme form of human intervention in natural processes? Or is it perhaps an overarching, soothing environment that suggests that life, in all its forms, goes on, a view of nature as enveloping and part of a larger system.
Van Zyl paints aspects of himself by means of painting his environment. Although his paintings reflect restrained, but unmistakable passion, Van Zyl doesn't paint his feelings directly - he paints what attracts his eye and the emotions and experiences that lie behind. He offers the viewer a process of discovery, an examination of what exists in his surroundings, in particular times and places. This commitment to looking is part of what makes his small, unassuming paintings such a source of continuing engagement for those who have the interest and ability to also look at what van Zyl sees.
Opened: October 24
Closes: November 12
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