kzn reviews

On the remaining wall, a series of paintings have been made with what the artists calls 'a single drop of ink' which the artist has stretched, pulled and charmed across an A3-sized page. A fairly large single drop, it seems, and I'm not sure how Hermanides manipulated the ink but the resulting forms are beautifully seductive. Then there's the fact that one of the images seems to contain a pair of eyes peering out of reading glasses at the top of the page; it's a form that simply doesn't seem to be the result of the random if controlled movement of ink – it looks photographic – but Hermanides remains tight-lipped about the process. Each painting is titled Self Portrait as a Woman in a Black Sash with the names of various women, presumably Black Sash members, suffixed in brackets.

The work in the Park Gallery exists within very narrow physical and conceptual scope and yet each of them contains a great deal, a kind of minimalism zooming in on the fractal construction of its lines. The remaining three works don't impress nearly as much, however. The video work Another Brick in the Wall, on display in the Electric Gallery, showed an hilarious act of physical deconstruction which, while thoroughly entertaining, didn't reach the heights of the work in the Park Gallery. The fact that it's actually the work of German video artist Voin de Voin is neither here nor there in Hermanides' world. Likewise, the single fluorescent tube that constitutes the work Instrusion, and which jutted through the main gallery wall into the cafe, didn't garner much of a response from me, lacking elegance and depth of concept.

Outside the gallery, an A0 photostat entitled Cuntish Questions featured a text-based barrage of stream of consciousness in the revolutionary mode. But while I fully empathise with Hermanides' desire not to respond to such questions (the world – and the art world – is full of them and I'm sure I've asked my share), the ramshackle text is profoundly unoriginal. If the use of the word 'cuntish' was designed to be provocative, it worked; several people complained. And while I thought the work was lukewarm, Hermanides will no doubt share my sentiment that those who are so easily offended should perhaps be more offended by both the inequities of the world, and also, and more significantly, the thoroughly pedestrian nature of most of the art on display in the Members' Exhibition with which he shared the gallery.

As for the work entitled Visitor which lurked in the Park Gallery, I just thought that it was a potted tree fern that was on its way to somewhere else in the gallery. That's the price you pay for not walking around with the list of the works in your hands.