It further defines the complex effect of navigating space against the push-and-pull effect of things, aka gravitas. It invites struggle and in that tension beauty arises.
One notes the strategic curatorship whereby the paintings neatly fit with the design elements - furniture, vases and the like – so that colour begins to reverberate; line becomes accentuated and form takes on symbolic meaning.
Such aesthetic charm exists amid the chaos and turmoil beyond the “white cube” – the gallery space.
Yet can there be poetry when history is littered with unspeakable horror, not to mention current problems globally.
One might sense a feeling of intimacy through the non-verbal language of colour and the weight of certain marks and tonalities.
One senses, without falling into a modernist trap-door that aura is back, that the art-object exudes presence. Words can only pinpoint, categorise and analyse and thus fails to “obliterate” the artist's mark. At the same time, words themselves create an analogue, a language in which the visual is framed and contextualised.
Muso Masoabi’s technique gives one a sense that one is looking at a surface, yet curiously the illusion of depth is created. That is, insofar as the surface itself becomes the content, at the same time the artist works into the surface, in effect giving it depth. Yet painting is necessarily two dimensional and as such, one might understand painting as a retreat to another world from whence it performs the function of narrative or aesthetic charm. For even at the inception of non-figurative painting, even in its genesis as metaphysical or simply geometric architecture, painting slowly becomes aware of the medium and then by implication, the surface.
One notes in fact that as painting changed over time so the artist wished to circumvent the illusion of depth on a flat surface, and asks the viewer to be present to its very objecthood or at least the means and processes of its creation.
Perhaps today, feeling the after effects of the history (of art), one is neither sure to see “something” in a painting, be it figurative or not, nor simply avail oneself to the material-aesthetic presence.
It is not clear whether this hiatus is peculiar to art as defined as fine art or encompasses culture as such. To put it rather briefly, Natasha Barnes’s works are an optical delight and reminds me of Barnet Newman’s statement that he wished to avoid the “outmoded props of history” and in her investment in the “other” of the verbal, she has found a dynamic expressive formal arrangement. While Paul Painting has produced paintings of photographic likeness that tease the eye. In such a way, the photograph itself becomes a metaphor for illusion and the altered painting becomes almost a photograph of a photograph.
In this sense, the philosophical quest for an ontology - the nature of being - is elusive. Kara Taylor’s work is mystical, eerie and a nocturnal, poetic narrative of sorts all at the same time. It is neither wholly negative in a kind of melancholic way nor manic, as patterns weave, duck and dive.
Vanessa Berlain’s slightly zany work with oil and thread can certainly be interpreted on many levels. One such option is that I felt it exuded a sense of uncertainty. Now this in itself is not necessarily negative for the ability to suspend judgement, the ability to not assume one is right, the necessity of doubt for building a robust argument and the collective impulse that arrogantly asserts itself with certainty often lacks empathy and a willingness to change.
In keeping with this, one might interpret Amy Ayanda’s paintings as that much more significant because they offer the viewer not so much a conclusion, a solution and an answer, but a process in motion. It is that energy which keeps singing, that which pauses in time and space only to create rhythm and endless possibilities within a structured aesthetic.
All in all, whatever the philosophical musings and speculations, one should not miss how the objects happily occupy the space and, without imputing some kind of vitalism, talk to one another.