From Po to Pierneef, from Dumas to Du Plessis, Letterlik is an exhibition facilitating a lively debate between the predominant spheres of Afrikaans art and Afrikaans prose. Originally conceived as a possible entry for this year’s US Woordfees (the popular Stellenbosch arts festival which took place at the beginning of the month), this group exhibition can now be seen at Absolut Art Gallery, Stellenbosch, until March 30.
Among the mix of old South African masters and more modern, contemporary artists being featured are JH Pierneef, JEA Volschenk, Edoardo Villa, C Louis Leipoldt, Marlene Dumas, Uys Krige and Anton Smit.
“Art (is the) expression of imagination,” the show catalogue reads. “(It starts) with a single word and (ends) with a masterpiece. A single piece of art can often be the topic of years of mystery and discussion.”
The blurb goes on to describe how the written word is another expression of the imagination.
“Painting with words brings clarity and insight to often vaguely understood concepts.”
Curated by the gallery's director, Gerrit Dyman Jr, Letterlik does exactly what its title suggests. It’s an exhibition that is a "literal" interpretation of a "word festival" (woordfees), inviting the living artists to attach a poem or piece of prose, along with their submission(s).
The theme is extended further by the fact that the majority of the paired-up texts and images on display appear to be actual "literal" references to one another’s content/theme.
“A carton box room/A newspaper blanket/This is all that he has/While the cold grinds,” Nadrie Botha’s poem (translated) reads next to one of her oil on-board paintings. Depicting a young boy squeezed inside a carton box, his hungry, haunting eyes confronting the viewer, the piece is titled Kartondooskind (carton box child).
Elsewhere in the gallery, a glass-reinforced polymer sculpture by Anton Smit shows two figures embracing each other while lying in the foetal position.
“For a moment we were one/Like the ocean’s billowing embrace,” reads the artist’s poem, Embrace.
Referring to an intimate farmhouse-kitchen scene with light radiating from an open door, Tinus de Jongh’s exquisite Farm House Interior gently "converses" with DPM Botes’s love poem, Elementêre Huis (elementary house).
An exhibition piece potent enough to stand out on its own, with or without supplementary text, is South African master JH Pierneef’s African Clay Pot with Calabash. This oil-based still life (paired with a poem by Bobette Smit) brings to light a subject matter by this artist that is rarely seen or celebrated - we tend to
associate Pierneef with the landscape genre.
Two paintings by JEA Volschenk also stand out. Both depict the awe-inspiring Zevenweeks Poort in the Swartberg region, and were painted during the early 1920s.
They are thoughtfully paired with Afrikaans author Uys Krige’s poem Plaashek (farm gate), which draws attention to the way nature opens up a "gate in the heart".
Staggering in its size and scope, Edoardo Villa’s steel figurine, Abstract Composition, greets the viewer when coming up the gallery’s stairs.
“Conscious or unconscious, you live in a country, you live with people, you pick up the emotion... I am involved with people,” read the Italian-born sculptor’s words placed at its base.
Among the newer voices whose works manage to find their own footing among such esteemed individuals from the past is the recent Stellenbosch graduate Gabriela Orzechowski.
Discovered by Dyman during the Visual Arts department’s annual GradX group exhibition last year, there is an alluring abstract vibe to her work, which is indicative of the contemporary art scene. Paired with Chinese poet Li Po, all five of Orzechowski’s minimalist exhibition pieces - most notably Time Spent Bewildered and Where the Mountains Appear - seem to vibrate with the Tang Dynasty writer’s vivid lines filled with imagery.
Since moving to Stellenbosch in September (from Willowbridge, Durbanville), Absolut Art Gallery has aimed to create a space where 20th century art, the work of our "masters", and contemporary South African art can be showcased side by side in the manner of museum shows, which have been using this juxtaposition as a way of being in conversation with the
past.
Through Letterlik, it has successfully evoked a "literal" conversation between words and images, showing how art from any period benefits from or riffs on words.
It will be interesting to see the ways in which the gallery further explores the relationship between the old and the new in future.
* Letterlik is showing at Absolut Art Gallery, 19 Ryneveld Street, Stellenbosch, until March 30. Gallery hours are Mondays to Fridays from 9am to 6pm, and Saturdays from 9am until 2pm. Contact 021 882 9296.