Peter Clarke, Man with Moths, 1972
Graham’s Fine Art
Last year when I interviewed Clarke at his double-storey terrace home in Ocean View, I asked this small, spry man about his sustained interest in the human form. Why, when so many of his peers and contemporaries – David Koloane, Durant Sihlali, Cecil Skotnes – moved through figuration, becoming increasingly abstract over time, did he remain committed to the human form? 'I think amazement at people, the person, the great variety that we represent, and the situations we get into', he replied. 'It’s difficult for me to voice. There are so many things about people that I find endlessly fascinating.' Painted two years after Listening to Distant Thunder, an important work held in the collection of the Johannesburg Art Gallery, this oil from 1972 typifies Clarke’s mid-career work, its recovery of wonderment and mystery at a time when he had just been forcibly moved from Simonstown to a bare, weather-beaten stretch of land overlooking Wildevoelvlei in the Noordhoek Valley.
Sanell Aggenbach, Bloom, 2011, oil on canvas
Joao Ferreira
The pleasures experienced by the two protagonists in this square painting are self-evident. Hung amidst a series of coyly suggestive works executed in Aggenbach’s chromatically spare, solarised style, this particular painting is uncomplicated and direct. It is what it is, gratuitous and intimate, a voyeur’s treat. Looking at it I was reminded of a photo in the Apartheid Museum. It shows a magistrate craning his head to see through a bedroom window into a room where, it was alleged, a mixed race couple had broken the law by doing something pleasurable in the manner of this couple.
Kyle Morland, Fibonacci’s spiral, 2009, bronze
Blank Projects
For a while, cleanliness occupied this Cape Town sculptor and photographer. Two years prior to creating this arcing, three-dimensional circular drawing, Morland, whose hair looks very Robert Smith (of The Cure) at the moment, made a cement and clay sculptural installation comprised of ten soap bars and three soap dispensers. The work, titled Cleanliness is Close to Godliness, included a towel rail. His new work, an example of which sits in the downstairs lobby of the Goodman Gallery in Cape Town, is big, monolithic and likeably austere. This bronze, which found a happy buyer on Friday, offers a cute (an adjective entirely appropriate to most conceptually applied sculpture, including Ed Young’s middle finger formulation nearby) description of personal transformation. It marks that awkward, self-aware moment between representation and something else, between meaning this but wanting to eventually say that.
Joni Brenner, untitled self-portrait, 2011, watercolour on paper
Fred [London] Ltd
For nearly two decades Joni Brenner worked with one sitter, Wilson Mootane. ‘He comes to the studio every Sunday, and we work for the whole day, re-visiting paintings from the previous sittings and/or beginning new ones’, Brenner told me in 2005. ‘Usually I work on anything between three and ten images over the course of the day. We talk a lot, break for lunch, several times for tea; we listen to music during the sittings. During the week, when I am not working with Wilson and in between teaching, I make watercolour studies of the two skulls I have in my studio’. Last year Mootane passed away. Brenner has since begun to explore self-portraiture. This subtly variegated monochrome painting forms part of a composite and incomplete self-portrait. It illustrates the artist’s groin. A controlled and skilled work that both portrays and reveals.
Pieter Hugo, Julia Clark, 2001/09, C-print
Joao Ferreira
Julia Rosa Clark’s name appears on the cover of the September issue of Art Review. I wrote the feature profile. Englishman Laurence Ellis took the portraits. Between the leisurely walk the three of us took through the Company’s Gardens and the final article, something got lost. Had I the leverage, I would have proposed this portrait of Clark by her former boyfriend, Pieter Hugo. I heard about it long before I ever saw it, on an assignment with Hugo in Malawi in 2003. Six years later, in April 2009, this portrait of Clark seated in front of an eggshell-coloured curtain, not quite naked, a fake flower in her mouth, was shown at Whatiftheworld Gallery, on the group exhibition ‘Sing into my Mouth’. ‘I had a very specific memory that I had been wearing a teal blue woollen skirt, and that I had felt odd, vulnerable, grumpy and resistant to taking my top off,’ wrote Clark in a note accompanying the exhibition, the participant list and orchestration of the show entirely her doing. In a caption to this one-off print, she explained her faulty recall of the image before meeting Hugo in a coffee shop and requesting the photo for her exhibition. ‘I’ve often gone back to the emotional memory of this event when looking at photographs. I often project this memory of awkwardness and resistance onto images of sitters, not only nude ones. I look for a certain look in the eye – one of slight confusion and self-consciousness’. When presented with the original slides from the private shoot – Hugo was testing his first large format camera – the memory proved false. ‘I wasn’t wearing that skirt at all – I had willingly stripped down even further and I looked rather calm, even amused. I search my memory banks to make sense of this image. No recall’. The pair finally agreed on this image for the exhibition, which Hugo printed the same scale as his recent portrait work. ‘Even though I still look like that person in the image, the only part of it that I can really identify with is the patch of eczema on the inside of my arm. This little patch seems real – it reveals the stress I was under at the time – the rest is the pose, a staged performance. As an act, the revival and “publishing” of this photograph seeks to explore and rectify my false memory, and sense of loss of control. Aesthetically pleasing, it has become an interesting relic of the beginning of a prominent career and the demise of a relationship’.
Georgina Gratrix, Mr Nice to Meet You, 2011, oil on canvas
SMAC Art Gallery
Hung next to a portrait she made of the painter Ian Grose, a former romantic liaison, this metre-sized portrait refines Gratrix’s breezy, gestural painting style. Although not entirely visible online, the brushwork is compelling. Taut and controlled, it lends her compositions, which effortlessly list between formal figuration and something approaching a rudimentary abstraction, a curious vigour. Last year, in a painting nearly a third the scale of this one, Gratrix painted a man (The Swiss Artist) with no facial features. A year and bit later, having switched galleries and upped her investment in canvas material and paint tubes, something strange is happening: an unmasking, of sorts.
