Deborah Poynton at Warren Siebrits Modern and Contemporary
by Michael Smith
When two facing works at an exhibition feature images of the artist crying and masturbating respectively, you know you're in some pretty heavy territory. 'The Grip of Circumstance', Deborah Poynton's fifth solo show and first in Johannesburg continues her characteristic over-real exploration of uncomfortable figures in spaces that don't so much contain as oppress them. This level of discomfort is inevitably shared by the viewer, who is forced into a position of physical and emotional voyeurism.
Poynton's style feels, in the best possible sense, like that of a (barely) reformed high school hyperrealist. The myriad areas of detail in her paintings positively clamour for attention. Yet while virtuosity for its own sake may function simply to seduce, the fulcrum of Poynton's approach is that this verisimilitude exists to explore complex emotional terrain. An almost impenetrable evenness of focus extends across each canvas, lending a disquieting intensity that departs from the photo-real and enters a realm far more psychological than retinal in its interest.
And while the gargantuan scale of the four works on show does suggest certain formal affinities with Photo-realism's first wave in the 60s, this turns out to be a superficial connection, as Poynton's compositions deal in configurations of figures and space that deny simplistic, surface-bound reading. Her ability to evoke psychologically tense situations through highly constructed images certainly isn't absent from this show; these images and their interrelationships electrify the compact space of Siebrits' gallery.
A pallour of personal tragedy hangs over this show. The image of Poynton's ex-husband, so frequently a part of her previous psychodramas, is absent from these scenes, and quite pointedly so. Ice Age, the work which depicts Poynton in the throes of onanistic self-exploration, is possibly the most riveting of all the paintings, as it goes right to the heart of desire and loss, themes of recurring interest for the artist. The work shows an image of a woman forming a closed, self-sufficient loop of her own body, hand to pubis, eyes closed. Yet the moment unfolds in a deliberately anonymous, 'institutional space' that seems to deny tenderness. The inclusion of an 'Ice Age' calendar, culled from Poynton's child's bedroom, speaks unambiguously of loneliness, and shifts the reading of the figure's action to one of desperation.
This painting recalls a history of related pictures, most readily a number of gouache and watercolour studies by Egon Schiele, in which his depictions of his self-pleasuring are the pictorial antithesis of titillation. The style of Schiele's images, all scratchy and hastily executed, accords with the content, as he pioneered a foray into self-deprecating abjection. By contrast the laboured quality of Poynton's image, with its dense thickets of near-obsessive brushwork, seems interested in a far more monumental conceptualisation of this act of self-discovery.
History, the work that contains an image of the artist crying, retraces steps both literal and figurative through Poynton's past and reflects on how this impacts on her child's future. In Poynton's words, 'this painting is about your needs not being met as a child and the effect this has had on me'. Poynton's clothed figure is framed by two older figures, both naked, and representative of parents. The male figure lounges in a libertine attitude, entirely at home in his skin and seemingly unaffected by the Poynton figure's outburst. The older female figure turns away from the scene and faces out to the viewer, possibly embarrassed or even desensitised by the younger woman's display of emotion. A certain weariness inflects her body language and facial expression. Crucially, neither of these people is shown looking at the Poynton figure. Consequently, one can sense frustration and anger along with sadness in her demeanour. The stare of the older woman is repeated by a child lying on the bed next to her, and the resultant scrutiny the viewer experiences is implicating, bordering on accusatory.
Where History obliquely recalls Jan van Eyck's Giovanni Arnolfini and His Bride (1434) (quiet domestic interior, couple pictured with the artist), Passage seems like a direct and deliberate reference. A man and a woman pose calmly for the painting, a small dog pictured along with them. As in van Eyck's Northern Renaissance masterpiece, the man is placed on the left of the image and the woman on the right. In Poynton's work an element of linear perspective, created by the lintel of the porch on which the figures stand, almost exactly echoes the canopy of the Arnolfini marriage bed. Yet at this point the similarities end. Where van Eyck's image celebrates the beginning of a union, Passageseems to lament endings, dissolution, and a process of playing out the last few moves of a stalemate game. A pillar functions as a compositional device, separating the two figures, each into their own space. The dense profusion of foliage behind the figures, rendered with extreme faithfulness, speaks of the strong emotion that remains unexpressed in the moment represented. While the man fixes the viewer's gaze, the woman's eyes are downcast, with a weariness comparable with that in History. The 'acceptance and gentleness' that Poynton speaks of in the text accompanying the show reads rather as resignation and despair.
This show seems to mark a distillation of Poynton's approach into one more focused. While she remains hyperactive in her treatment of paint, image and space, the 'barnstormers' that Lloyd Pollack spoke about in a February 2006 review on ArtThrob are absent. The scale on which these images exist speaks less of 'showmanship' than of the intensity of the emotions and psychological states Poynton wishes her viewer to explore. Her virtuosity seems calculated less to impress than to convince the viewer of the importance of memorialising these moments of unease.
Opened: May 10
Closes: June 15
Warren Siebrits Modern and Contemporary Art
146 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood, Johannesburg
Tel: (011) 327 0000
Email: gallery@seymour23.co.za
www.warrensiebrits.co.za
Hours: Tue - Sat 11am - 6pm
