Current Review(s)
'Civilized Violence'
Jaco van den Heever at ArtSpace'The process by which a spatial image can be transposed into the emotional sphere is expressed by the spatial concept. It yields information on the relation between man and his environment. It is the spiritual expression of the reality that confronts him. The world that lies before him is changed by it. It forces him to project graphically his own position if he wants to come to terms with it.'
Sigfried Giedion 1965
Jaco van den Heever’s latest charcoal drawings now on exhibition at Artspace in Parkwood are exquisitely and obsessively detailed images. The works depict lonely and abandoned buildings within equally unforgiving landscapes. The buildings are situated in the landscape in such a way that one questions their very reason for being. Human presence is absent, disturbing the normal continuum between 'man', buildings and landscape.
Heidegger writes that 'we attain to dwelling, so it seems, only by means of building. The latter, building, has the former, dwelling, as its goal'.1 The built forms Van den Heever represents - a church, a fragment of Hillbrow, a modernist highrise apartment complex - might have originally had dwelling as a goal, but now they appear only as buildings that may or may not be inhabited. Even the images of man-made industrial structures such as power pylons and railway tracks appear within the landscape as directional pointers, potential pathways; but to where? The built forms suggest that they are part of an urban domain, but one whose paths lead both in, towards dwelling, and out, away from dwelling. The buildings are mute, and the landscape is merely 'that of the "ground" on which the configurations of […] space have been developed'.2
23 June 2010 - 14 July 2010
Listings(s)
'Civilized Violence'
Jaco van den Heever at ArtSpaceJaco van den Heever presents a new body of work titled 'Civilized Violence'. Van den Heever questions the ideological framework of our contemporary society through a series of large scale drawings, rendered with fine detail.
23 June 2010 - 14 July 2010
