'Youth Day'
Anton Karstel at SMAC ART GALLERY CAPE TOWNIn Youth Day, Anton Karstel works from archival film footage taken by his father during a gymnastics display held at Loftus Versveld in Pretoria on May 30, 1966 as part of the Republic Day Festivals. Karstel painted stills from a fifty-eight second strip of 8mm Kodak film. From the vantage point of his father’s camera, the old South African flag dominates the foreground. Behind the flag, choreographed youth perform various acrobatic exercises designed to display the ideology of Volksgesondheid.
Rendered over a hundred and twenty times in oil on canvas, the image of the flag shifts further away from its origin in time and in format. Working from a poor quality digital version of the original film footage, and re-photographing frames of the flag, Karstel proceeds to paint the subsequently corroded images of effected quality-loss and “digital distortion”. Here, Karstel is interested in the imperfections and pixelations that occur in the re-recording of these stills. In this installation, Karstel formulates a personal dialogue between video and painting. The fleeting fifty-eight seconds, captured by his father, is reworked and reclaimed by Karstel’s hand in an excess of paintings produced over almost a year. For the artist, there is an acknowledgment of this production as “excessively unnecessary”, a labour-intensive replication of “mass repetition” as if in an infinite drawing out of meaning and information.
28 June - 11 July
