Peter Friedl 'Threory of Justice' at the Goodman Gallery

Austrian artist Friedl brings a solid show to the Johannesburg Goodman, complete with two great videos and an impressive text/map piece.

Friedl's interests lie in social justice theory, evident in his silkscreens of press photographs (one of which features an image of well-heeled young German men parading a placard that says the equivalent of 'Yuppies against Nazi Pigs'), as well as the video 'Liberty City', a chilling clip of citizens turning on the police force somewhere in urban USA.

Despite my star tutorial courtesy of 1995 Johannesburg Biennale director Lorna Ferguson, I found much of the work rather hermetic without accompanying text. Why do galleries/artists think it is smart to shut the door on people who are already in their spaces? Why did I need to go to a walkabout on Saturday morning to fully grasp the work?

The highlight of the opening came with Moshekwa Langa visibly channeling his inner Wayne Barker, shouting barely-articulated insults and distributing red wine far and wide. Embarrassment ensued for everyone except Langa...

Mary Wafer at Brodie/Stevenson

Over at Brodie/Stevenson things were much quieter, as the Wits crowd, possibly regulated by the R10-a-glass vino charge, orbited gently in their own valence. The show is probably one of the strongest you'll see by a young artist this year and, to my mind, places Wafer in a very select group of about five people in SA doing anything good with paint (in case you care, the others are Penny Siopis, Georgina Gratrix, Robert Hodgins and Dorothee Kreutzfeldt). But then that's just my opinion.

Wafer's works exhibit an often perfect balance between careful restraint and gesture, creating a constant and tantilising interplay between image and surface. This is just as well, since her content of the Johannesburg landscape could so easily have gotten itself mired in histronics and hyperbole.

This is a slow burner of an exhibition, and driving home one falls into the habit of spotting momnets in the city's architecture and structures where Wafer's understanding of urban space resonates.

Maja Maljevich at David Krut Projects

This was a great surprise: Maljevich's mastery of paint and iconography seem to come together in this show. Her works are as lucid as they are dreamy, their surfaces as fluid as they are encrusted. Maljevich is an artist that has clearly paid attention to history of art: one detects traces of Guston and Nolde at certain moments, yet the effect is one of a thoroughly-resolved personal language.

Watch this artist: the SA art star system needs precisely this kind of work to reinject an imaginative take on an often pallidly-rendered set of socio-political concerns.