Approaching four tins, recognisable as containers of Vicks Vaporub (Bridget Baker's So It Goes (1996)), I noticed, in the furthest of them, a swirl of blood. Working backwards through the tins, I see the swirl resolving itself into a small but intricately rendered image: a faint suggestion of a young girl and an older man. The swirl appeared, at first, to be the start of a series of violent extrapolations, but was instead the ending of a gradual decline. The closer and closer I was drawn to the work, the more I was aware I could not smell the ointment.

*****

With anticipation, one is drawn from work to work on 'Intimate Distance', at the Iziko SANG. Circling the room in this way, one might stop briefly to examine a piece: its colour, its texture, its technique, before moving on to the next. There is a rhythmic pattern of large and small works. Approaching the larger works, one finds they reveal no more from a close inspection than they do from a broad gaze - perhaps less so. They are more properly perceived then, from a distance. Similarly the smaller works invite close inspection but ultimately reveal little. One seems bound to circumnavigate the vast exhibition space without any real sense of a trajectory.

One might be grabbed by a detail: a mess of tangled cables in a painting of a desk lamp (Dorothy Kay's The Lamp (1956)). One might begin, perhaps, to build a relationship from this detail; the cables are a metaphor for a contemporary form of social connection, one that has become increasingly fragmented by the ephemeral nature of that connection. One might project a modern insecurity onto the painted surface and in a moment be denied that insight, discovering that the painting comes from an age where that sentiment, that insecurity has little currency.

*****

I found myself pausing between the two televisions playing Carole-anne Gainer's Pissing (2004), and Lynne Lomofsky's Cross Sections II (2000). The two works form an environment with Dorothee Kreutzfeldt's Contamination (1997). The videos constitute an intrusive presence in an otherwise quiet and reflective space. Facing Contamination, I realised this was the only point in the gallery where I was aware of being surrounded.

*****

Keith Deitrich's vast painting of five men, Sidney, Wandile, Aubrey, Richard and Arthur (1985-6), is rendered with such precision and accuracy that one feels perhaps its meaning should be as clearly articulated as its image. But on approaching it, details which seem as if they should culminate in some conclusive line, or boundary, simply fade as the graduation of colour bleeds from one field into the next. The reassuring trace of human contact or manipulation of surface is simply not there. This is the first and most readily realised element in the contradiction on which this collection of work is predicated. This contradiction is the assumed dependent relationship between intimacy and physical closeness (for which, indeed, the show was named).

One might then be drawn to the smaller, more detailed work like Sheila Nowers', Half-Past Twelve (1991), which unsurprisingly, is adjacent. Again, one is compelled to look for that detail which might elicit the greater comprehension of the work - through which one might fully enter into the work - but again, one is disappointed. The group of three women have their backs to the viewer, and are looking at something unattainably outside of the frame. This sentiment is the second element of that same contradiction; the compulsion to seek to be enveloped in a work, to enter into some intercourse with it.

This contradiction arises from the pursuit of intimacy in a work of art from which one is completely alienated. It is the nature of a show in which collections are picked through, and works selected from their original context to conform to a new theme, that, as a group, they evoke alienation. In viewing only a single work, one can seldom wholly subsume oneself in the artist's initial experience of a particular notion. In submission to the artist's discourse, one experiences a profound sense of connection - an intimacy.

At this point one might feel that one has struck upon something: a private understanding by which one has grasped the scope of the exhibition, of which previously one had no perspective. Where before one drifted from work to work, drawing from them nothing more than mere empirical appreciation, disappointed quickly at each assumption of understanding, one can now connect them along a thread of personal estrangement. At this point, one might read the exhibition's explanatory text and find writ large, every personal reflection and revelation, every sense of personal connection with a thematic exploration, therein. Even that minor intimacy, that connection which one feels should be one's own - one's personal reaction - is denied.

It is a cruel exhibition in a sense. It makes one painfully aware of one's attempt to abandon oneself in order to connect with anything. Its nature prevents connecting with works on an individual basis. It is structured with a rhythm which prompts one to repeat the action of abandon. It does all this in the largest exhibition space in the Gallery. To move from work to work one must pass through interstices of gray void. A void in which one is faced with simply losing oneself to nothing. The reason one might find oneself stopping between the two video works is that they constitute the only space in the exhibition in which one is safely surrounded by an idea.

*****

I circled the room once more, ending at the tins. The blood was still visceral, the image of the girl being supported by her father still poignant. I studied them silently for a few more moments, breathed deeply, and then left.

Matthew and James King are both studying at Michaelis; Matthew in his Honour's year, and James in Second year

Opens: November 2008
Closes: March 15

Iziko South African National Gallery
Government Avenue, Company Gardens, Cape Town
Tel: (021) 467 4660
Email: cquerido@iziko.org.za
www.museums.org.za/iziko
Hours: Tue - Sun 10am - 5pm