Andrew Verster 'Past/Present: New Work since 1994' at the Durban Art Galley

The show is beautifully curated by Carol Brown, who has a deep and rich knowledge of Verster and his work; in fact, one of the early Surf City paintings have been lifted from her own home. What struck me about Brown's curation was how unspectacular it was, in terms of the dominant modernist approach to curating. Instead of austerity, formality and lots of white space, she has allowed Verster's work to occupy a collective narrative defined by the work's warmth and idiosyncratic rhythms. Verster is increasingly engaged with spiritual concerns and the exhibition reflects and absorbs this direction, the baroque gentility of the gallery taking on the air of a cathedral with the artist's work functioning as stained glass masterpieces. And I have never seen the work look so good. 'Past/Present' also benefits from the gallery's newly acquired – and long awaited –  lighting setup which, with the help of the artist's exceptional use of colour, gives the exhibition a glow that is almost tangible.

Although Verster's recent output continues to garner critical acclaim and commercial success, some have expressed reservations about what they see as the decorative or ornamental nature of the work. But this concern  misses, I think, much of the point of Verster's recent artistic exploration, in which it increasingly feels like he is trying to compress the very cosmos into his paintings. His tattooed bodies are not simply decorated bodies but bodies bodies both weighted down and liberated with the infinite iconography of millennia of spiriturality and history. This is Verster's engagement with the everything and it is Hindu in origin but universal in its concern.

This sense of the cosmic is both reinforced and constructed by his  use of colour. The dominant tones in much of his work seem to be sliding off the visible spectrum. The resulting effect disturbs one's depth of field and, with many of the images, the picture's planes slide back and forth in one's vision. Verster uses this trick – although trick seems too loaded a word – to allow his bodies to contain rather than to express. You look into the image and notions of foreground and background evaporate.

Although Verster identifies himself primarily as a painter, this has not stopped him from being something of a renaissance man. As well as being a talented writer, Verster has in recent years expanded his oeuvre to include costume and set design for various stage productions from  the high brow experiment of Birth of An African Opera to the profane pantomime Sinderella. 'Past/Present' incorporates much of this non-gallerial output, including both Verster's initial designs sketches and the resulting costumes, many of which were made by the Durban Playhouse's seamstresses.

In this broad spread of works across various mediums and disciplines, 'Past/Present' documents the works of one of Durban's most prolific and fluid artistic talents. There is a sense of things overflowing, both in many individual works, and also in the broader exhibition. This sense of flow, of the artist as a conduit of energy, increasingly defines the spirit of Verster's work as he moves deeper into the 21st century and new South Africa he love so much.