Painting by Clive van den Berg and Zander Blom

The advent of photography broke painting free from itself. Free from the tyranny of realistic representation, opening up a field of possibilities, forging the path to abstraction. Since photographers learned to fix light and capture the elusive moment, the painter’s role has changed. 

The photograph is considered to embody death – perhaps only a small one, les petite mort. That moment captured will never occur again, it is fixed, there on the surface of the image; in the dispersion of silver particles time itself appears to stand still. 

By contrast, the surface of a painting breathes into life a moment that is seemingly endless. From the grain and weave of the canvas, to the layers of medium that animate its demarcated plain, the painting can go on and on, stretching the fields of perception. 

Abstraction is a sticky label. It implies firstly that ideas presuppose events. That the referent of reality is lost in favour of what can be perceived by the mind. Here between the rift of the recognisable and the obscure, the moment of a painting finds itself. We always know that we are looking at something, paint on canvas, but the subject matter is very often elusive. The moment no longer seems singular but extended, almost running ad infinitum.

It is true that in recent years, the subject of painting has turned, again, in upon itself. After being freed from its own limitations it seems that painting was caught up in its own self-referential trap. In this way it has become its own action, its own reference, a hermetic system with a set register. 

This register is constantly being reinvented, reinvigorated, tested. Two recent exhibitions by Clive van den Berg and Zander Blom illustrate how artists are attempting to deal with abstraction in two very different ways. Whilst there are similarities, the two styles are very different. In van den Berg’s case, with his show titled 'Soundings, In Passage' at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg, the artist takes his cue from the landscape. In what appear to be cartographical renderings, the paint retreats into finely worked recesses of colour. 

The smaller works are more captivating than the larger canvases simply because their detail is so fine, allowing the worked sections to come alive. This is a colourful show. A tiny work, Gleaning (2011), of pigeons on a green surface is startling. The underpainting of a transparent umber against the green edges of paint gives the entire composition a ground against which to cast the birds’ shadows.

Another smaller work which conjures an impressionistic scene reminiscent of Alfred Sisley is Soundings in Dust (2011), the obvious difference residing in the palette. Painted during his time in the United States between the Smithsonian Artist Research fellowship and working at the LeRoy Neimen Center for Print Studies while on a residency at Columbia University in New York, the colours van den Berg uses are richer than the cold European light employed by the Impressionists.

The element that combines these two disparate factors is the title, Soundings in Dust which would explain the smoky atmosphere he has achieved – the delicate greens painted into the sky against the muted orange. The painting feels like taking an afternoon walk in the setting sun, the bleached landscape illuminated by the length of falling rays. Perhaps this ephemeral feeling is best captured in the words of another South African, Ivan Vladislavic, who writes in The Exploded View (2004):

'He spent many hours gazing at this picture, trying to decipher the specific meaning of America that lay in these shapes and shades… This place, impossibly distant and unreal, filled him with a playful longing, an ache for containment that was peculiarly like homesickness. To be bathed in these colours, held by this light falling benevolently on every surface, aglow with prosperity and happiness' (pg. 175).

In Zander Blom’s latest exhibition at Stevenson Johannesburg, simply titled 'New Paintings', the artist has explored the surface and ground of painting, but to very different ends. Whilst van den Berg’s painting is worked and layered, Blom displays a more impulsive interrogation of chance.

This chance is held within the gesture itself against which its result on the unprimed surface is imprinted with a different kind of urgency. Besides the fact that the oil around the resultant mark stains the Belgium linen as it seeps out, what remains evident is Blom’s choice and control of the chance. His composition is restricted to the borders of the frame. Whilst they are elegant in their texture, when Blom overworks the mark they crowd the frame and remain limited by the edges of the canvas.

However, Blom is obviously experimenting with a certain vocabulary. Most of the paint will take years to dry beneath the slowing drying exterior of his blotches of paint. There is something organic achieved as the stain of the oil seen in the medium floats out to surround the marks in a blemished halo. 

In some of the larger examples, such as 1.77 and 1.54 (the works are all numbered rather than titled, possibly a reference to Pollock’s detatchment from subject matter), Blom has given the surface bright colour. Painting thin layers over each other has given the surfaces an incandescence onto which the artist has affectively thrown the paint to create his marks. Perhaps the gestural confinement of some of his examples could be attributed to the fact that the paint is so thick. However, the stretching moment that his work addresses feels as if it originates from the inside out and not beyond the limits of the frame. 

This is not always the case. Like van den Berg, in the smaller works, Blom achieves the sensation of time stretching, where the limits of his gesture are elongated to their very ends. As Vladislavic again says ‘the universe was expanding, we were causing it to expand, by analysing it’ (pg. 190). Blom’s interrogation of the components of painting likewise pursue a similar materiality, in their deconstructive endeavour ‘…every solid thing had been exploded, gently, into its components…each part hover(s) just out of range of the other it was meant to meet, with precise narrow spaces in between’ (pg. 171). 

Matthew Partridge is a freelance writer and regular contributor to ArtThrob.