Vuyile Voyiya at the AVA
by Lloyd Pollak
The goal of Vuyile Voyiya's endeavour is to translate the European old master tradition into a distinctively new and vibrant African vernacular in 'Pentimenti', his new show at the AVA. An overwhelming classical influence manifests itself in Voyiya's breezy mastery of what Sir Joshua Reynolds called 'the language of the Gods', the richly expressive body language deployed in Graeco-Roman sculpture and the masterpieces of the High Renaissance and Baroque. An heroic figure style is the foundation of this parlance in which grandly monumental sculptural beings communicate basic human emotions such as fear, aggression, exultation and adoration through demonstrative pose, sweeping rhetorical gesture and eloquent facial expression.
Paradoxically Voyiya makes the humble linocut the vehicle for his attempt to naturalise this lofty tradition. In this country, the linocut is closely associated with black art, particularly township and protest art. The very medium functions as a proclamation of African identity, making Voyiya's art a synthesis of the European and the sub-Saharan.
One tends to associate the linocut with bold, broad simplified imagery of a one-dimensional type produced by expansive contrasting masses of black and white. Instead of working in the conventional manner, Voyiya miniaturises the medium, and handles it with such dazzling technical sophistication, as to completely transform it.
His imagery is generated by a blitz of small oval, triangular, round and arc-shaped blobs of white on black. These forms create an effect like a shower of light as they fall onto the anatomies, modelling them in three dimensions, and defining the shallow space in which they exist.
The cascading flecks vary in size and convey a variety of phenomena. The large ones read as highlights, and signify proximity to the picture plane. The smaller ones represent both distance and half tones. In this way, the linocut is elevated into a finely tuned instrument ideally suited to the study of light, of space and of the contortions of the rounded human form as it swings around its own axis in contrapposto. The dots render foreshortening to perfection, and register minimal shifts in the tension of musculatures braced by torsion and strain.
The decorative splendour of the dot technique emerges when the linocut is viewed from close up. Then suddenly three dimensions collapse into two, and the cylindrical limbs dissolve into patterns of energised dots that vibrate like swarms of midges suspended in a beam of light.
There are five separate suites of serial images in which nudes, or figures in tribal loincloths, or, occasionally, conventional evening dress, are portrayed in movement or closely related poses. Strict symmetry dominates and each wall is filled with complementary images. Thus while one wall contains Black and Blue, five portrayals of the crouching or seated male nude, the other is hung with Searching for a Lost Lullaby, five delineations of his female counterpart. Such parallelisms reinforce the sense of classical balance, discipline and restraint.
The bodies materialise upon a shallow stage and its dimensions are staked out by outstretched limbs. These extend forward toward the picture plane, and backward toward the black ground which closes off the space. The compositions are thus entirely filled by the body, and nothing but the body, and this ruthless single-mindedness lends the imagery extraordinary concentration and intensity.
The nudes are presented in big close-up in tightly cropped compositions where scalps and loins are often truncated by the framing edge. This fosters a sense of intimate proximity, and promotes our involvement in Voyiya's mysterious emblematic scenarios.
Naturalistic renditions of the naked body have always formed the basis of art school training, and nothing could possibly sound as drearily academic as Voyiya's unrelenting anatomical emphasis. However the artist never creates any sense of dèjavu, for his taste for strenuous action and conflict differentiates his figures from the conventional static studio nude. Secondly although anatomy is naturalistic, Voyiya's images are remote from the everyday, for his presentation aspires to the high stylisation of grand opera and Greek tragedy. Thereby his protagonists are majestically elevated into African equivalents of classical heroes and heroines. They are black Antigone's and Agamemnon's, universal archetypes invested with a timeless mythological grandeur and remoteness.
In Reconciling Dissonant Chords, an epic cast of two freeze in extraordinarily graceful and fluid balletic poses as they attempt to shield each other from some invisible danger lurking beyond the frame. Their elegantly interlinked bodies convey both reciprocal passion, and the inevitable clash of male and female psychology.
The hero is all fiery impetuous aggression as he wields his panga in attack. His paramour by contrast, embodies tender protectiveness and caution as she attempts to calm and restrain her lover. Their triumph over adversity, and their own conflicting personalities are celebrated in the central image where the lovers spin around each other in an ecstatic pas de deux.
There is a tragic dimension to their rapture for the black ground becomes a materialisation of the void, and the figures dance in heroic defiance on the very edge of the abyss that threatens to engulf them. The equation between erotic thraldom and Thanatos is made again in the lyrically romantic Spring Time is Coming which depicts embracing lovers swooning in expiratory poses as they whirl through a smouldering tango.
'Pentimenti' forms a rousing celebration of human possibility in general, and of the potential of this nation in particular. Vuyiya is not a mere formalist, and his paired figures obviously carry an emblematic freight. They represent a black Everyman and woman trooping into our future, and function as symbols of opposing forces within the state. This gentle nationalism is pointed up by the radiant sonorities of Le Quattro Stagioni which accompany a video, and pour through the gallery like a bracing draught of mountain air. With its jubilant sense of irresistible forward movement, Vivaldi's music creates a sense of advance, of light vanquishing darkness that underlines Voyiya's cautious optimism. We are thus persuaded that the discordant notes in our political orchestra pit will be reconciled, and the lost lullaby of union recovered.
Note: Vuyile Voyiya was the subject of Artbio in August '05.
Opened: August 22
Closes: September 10
AVA
35 Church Street, Cape Town
Tel: (021) 424 7436
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Email: avaart@iafrica.com
www.ava.co.za
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