Sicelo Ziqubu makes his art from wire and papier mâché. But while that medium is often used to make clichéd objects that sell in gift shops and at curio stalls on the side of the road around Southern Africa, Ziqubu's artistic scope is large indeed and his works pay little heed to satisfying the desires of others - curio buyers or art buyers - for something approaching product.

The large body of work which showed at artSPACE Durban incorporates an enormous visual landscape whose concerns cut across South African time and space. From sculptural portraits of Ladysmith Black Mambazo (instantly recognisable from across the room, hands raining down to the earth in their unique manner) to municipal waste workers to bizarrely literal illustrations of loan sharks, hordes of insects, animals, soccer players and musicians, Ziqubu's scope borders on the infinite. The dominant pieces are large, intricately constucted thrones which contain the aforementioned - as well as many other - themes and details. Also included are paintings surrounded by flamboyant three dimensional papier mâché frame structures.

By the time I saw the show a few days before the end of its run, only two works had sold, and this may have something to do with the difficulty of displaying them in an average house (their internal diversity and structurally finicky quality demands at least a bit of three-dimensional white space around them. They would look impressive in the gallerial spaces which constitute the homes of some well-to-do art buyers. In my own over-decorated space, they might take on the tone of bric-a-brac). At the same time, I'm not sure that local art audiences, including most gallerists and curators, are completely convinced that Ziqubu's work, and more generally the papier- mâchéd medium he favours, constitute fine art, despite the fact that his work is to be found in many public collections.

If that is the case, I think they're wrong, and I strongly suspect that at some point, Ziqubu and his genre will be picked up on by some American or European collector. The work contains multitudes and, in terms of its issues and visual content, is hugely representative of South African life. It is also not simply a kind of constructed art-brut which parlays to western notions of naïveté tinged with curio. The works are often extremely complex in construction and, along with their topical and representational themes, they also point to much older human concerns. Ziqubu's world is shrouded in natural mythology and symbolism and the principles of sacred geometry often appear in his work. And there is something fundamentally wonderful about an individual trying to commit so much of the world to his medium with such impressionistic success.

There is an apparent naïveté present though. The fine details of the works are invariably simply and roughly hewn. It is tempting to suggest that Ziqubu should spend more time refining his details but I'm not convinced that it would improve the work. In fact the roughness may be integral to it. We don't suggest that Robert Hodgins or Van Gogh lack detail and there is, I believe, a degree of condescension in this impulse that comes partially from the hierarchy of the art world and partially from the materials used and the work's insistent workmanlike quality.

There is also - given the artist's prolific desire to produce - the sense that he needs to start making the next work and the one after that and the one after that. Not all of the works are equally finished and curator Karen Bradtke pointed to a particularly elaborate throne and told me that if anyone bought the piece the artist would finish it first.

Also present is the use of metaphors so direct and explicit that they take on an edge of surreality. A loan shark is represented as a physical shark on whose back a surfer balances, while bees are used to represent Black Economic Empowerment and its failures. Talking about a piece called The Reign of Flies, Ziqubu, in his hand-written exhibition notes, writes, 'this seemed to be an unfinished story of flies as a symbol of dirt in a throne formation. This is a sad fact that nowadays, not only in our country, most people in high positions (such) as parliamentarians, ministers and even state presidents are treacherous, corrupt and, fortunately for them, able to cover their dirty trails in order to remain in power although their dirty reign is short and as delicate as flies' legs.'

If the work of Ziqubu - and others who make similar work - does one day get a commercial reappraisal, it will probably be concurrent with a peak in the cycle of the trend towards outsider art. And part of the question of the value of the artist's wire and paper world lies in the relationship between mainstream art and outsider art. While Ziqubu's work often makes it into galleries, the work is produced entirely outside of what we might call the art world and there is little sense that Ziqubu is trying to satisfy anyone else other than himself. Bradtke told me the story of the artist putting the entire, relatively fragile body of work on a passenger train and transporting it from Pietermaritzburg. This might not sound so remarkable but if you saw the sheer mass of work here, you would appreciate the epic nature of that journey, a far cry from the air-conditioned trucks that move works between locations in the richer regions of Planet Art.

I suggested to Bradtke that the exhibition might have benefitted from fewer works but she was keen to emphasise the cornucopic nature of Ziqubu's work (my word not hers, but I'm sure that's what she meant). And I see her point. Ziqubu's work overflows - both as individual pieces and collectively. There is a veritable river of creation present. And to suggest that anything should stop it flowing would clearly be sinful.

Opens: February 16
Closes: March 7

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