Helmut Starke

Listings(s)

'Elegies to the Slender Scrubb'

About a hundred metres from artist Helmut Starcke’s home in the seaside hamlet of Betty’s Bay is the Harold Porter National Botanical Garden. It is cocooned in the heart of the Cape Fynbos region, with the Kogelberg Biosphere Reserve forming a monolithic backdrop to the floral diversity below.

Fynbos frames Starcke’s house. Seamless fields of scrub – in yellow, lilac, gold and green – snake along the scenic ocean drive between Pringle Bay and Kleinmond. In fact, with around 1 600 plant species, the fynbos appears ubiquitously spread across the region, displaying a floral diversity per unit area that is greater than anywhere else in the world. It makes sense therefore that fynbos, or ‘slender scrub’ as it is translated, literally, from Dutch, should comprise the principal iconography of Starcke’s current body of works.

To those familiar with his prodigious oeuvre, this exhibition revisits a recurring refrain throughout Starcke’s career: his unremitting passion for conservation and his concerns about the potential waste and degradation of natural environments. This show may be read, therefore, as an elegy of sorts to an endangered plant species. But it is also about Betty’s Bay itself – its existence circumscribed by the bookends of the Kogelberg and the sea – as well as a reflection of Starcke’s personal and artistic trajectory.

Rich in visual symbolism, Starcke’s imagery eludes semantic pigeonholes. Yet his metaphysical explorations are articulated at ground level. Intellectually charged and protean, elegant and elegiac, his paintings speak as much of an embrace as they do of a lament. And ultimately they signify a celebration of a creative alchemy that is as transformative, fragile and ineffable as the life cycle of the ‘slender scrub’ itself.

10 October 2013 - 09 November 2013