The Inner and Outer Landscape
Ashraf Jamal
We inhabit the world, as the world inhabits us. To suppose a separation between an inner and outer world is not only to misunderstand what it means to be, but to betray the infinite world that seeps through us – a world as tangible and visceral as it is imperceptible and unknowable. Unduly influenced by the Socratic and Cartesian imperatives – know thyself and I think therefore I am – our priority has centred on consciousness and reason. But to what extent are we the sum of our conscious thoughts alone? Are we solely the sum of what we present or declare ourselves to be? Is the image merely a re-presentation, a surface truth defined by what is seen? We suppose ‘visual culture’ to be about looking. However, we forget to remember the phenomenology of looking – the fact that looking is as physical as it is cultural, that no perception is purely one’s own.
In his poem, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’ T.S. Eliot writes – ‘There will be time, there will be time / To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.’ While Eliot is concerned with our terribly anxious self-awareness, our worry as to how to disport ourselves, his words are eerily prophetic in this era of the Selfie, Instagram, and Facial Recognition. Perhaps, however, we have always been unduly preoccupied with surface, with what things look like. Notwithstanding that likenesses are comparative, that sameness supposes a false equivalence. Similes and metaphors are linguistic devices. Metaphor, Nietzsche declares, is the equating of the unequal. It is better not to claim the world in one’s name, but to name oneself in the world. Life, after all, is a perpetual discovery.
This is Karen Cullinan’s founding curatorial belief in her show, The Imprint of Elsewhere. ‘To firmly fix an impression or memory in someone’s mind … often with a lasting impact,’ an imprint has a sedimented quality. Contrary to the view of impressionism as a fleeting apprehension of an ephemeral world, an imprint is far deeper than we think. That Claude Monet repeatedly returned to the same scene, reveals the degree to which nothing in the world is ever absolutely binding. Even rocks change, he remarked. It is this deeply lasting insight which Cullinan holds fast. Her aim is not to fix an impression, but to reveal how each individual differently embraces-experiences-understands the world. If an elsewhere is vital, it is because we are porous, because the world enters our being continuously – because our lives are the paradoxical sum of a discontinuous continuum.
For Cullinan, it is ‘the intersection between art and psychology explored through the inner unspoken language of the psyche, the subconscious, the soul,’ that matters. In this vital regard, the visual artist becomes the translator and conduit. ‘Every artist carries an invisible map – an imprint of memory, experience, and imagination that shapes their vision of the world.’ That which the artist carries, however, is not only an arsenal, a means through which experiences are rendered and stories told. Technique and being are complexly interwoven. For as the nineteenth century novelist, Emile Zola, observed, art is ‘nature seen through a temperament.’ The journey taken to understand an artist is, therefore, the journey taken to understand oneself. An artwork is never only a consumable or commodity. It is, as the title of this exhibition makes evocatively clear – an imprint from elsewhere. Where exactly, is not the point. Maps are expressions of desire and not only economies of orientation.
The works of six artists are on show – Tania Welgemoed, Frans Thoka, Sue Martin, Fumani Maluleke, Henrico Greyling, and James de Knoop. What, then, is imprinted in each? What is the visual record of their experience? What their temperament? For Welgemoed, it is ‘the South African landscape, flora and fauna, and spirit of place,’ that ‘stirs’ her ‘soul.’ Hers, however, is not only a botanical record, but a psychogeography. Markmaking and painting are her related yet distinct means of finding herself in the world. Her media is diverse, spanning oil, watercolour, monoprints, even assemblage. Hers is a world that is not only seen but built. It can also be fleeting. ‘A quick brushstroke is often more descriptive than a detailed depiction of a subject.’ The impressionistic leaning toward a ‘hazy light’ affords ‘a dreamlike quality.’ If ‘figurative abstraction’ is Welgemoed’s coda, it is because it embraces ‘recognisable forms,’ and every other that refutes recognition. Here, the abstract is akin to an elsewhere, and what we suppose a given can, in an instant, become strange, and estranging.
For Sue Martin, a ‘layering process’ allows for ‘luminosity in each stroke.’ A subtle ‘density’, a ‘build up of various thicknesses’ produces a pictorial soup that is as finely serried as it is deep. Through this delicately imprinting of layer upon layer ‘an unforeseen magic’ emerges. One senses the artist’s wonder in the moment of revelation. That her art is as ‘compelling’ as it is ‘ambiguous’, affirms the power of abstraction, which, as Jerry Saltz reminds us is not only primal but continuously radical, precisely because it ‘circumvents language, and sidesteps naming or mere description.’ Martin shares this vision. For her, there are far deeper connections, a relationship with a given place or land that is not merely associative. It is ‘a sense of light’ in her paintings ‘that hints at a relationship with landscapes without being bound to specific sites.’ Freedom of being and movement is key. Nothing is declarative, nothing illustrative. Martin’s love of an inner light is perhaps Turneresque in its intensity. Her artworks ‘resonate within’ at the very instant that an impression emerges. The effect is dilatory, the driving force intuitive. Veridian greens and cerulean blues prevail.
James de Knoop’s paintings, by way of contract, possess a gloaming density. While the focus in a given painting may seem arbitrary, it is the artist’s preoccupation with abandonment – with what is abandoned – that is telling. It is not only the precarity of his personal being in the world that is central, but precarity itself, as a pervasive and conditional psychic unsettlement. As ‘civilisation’ in the form of urban development ratchets, this movement invariably occurs ‘alongside spaces forgotten and forsaken.’ Here, I am reminded of Walter Benjamin’s description of Eugene Atget’s photographs as a ‘scene of a crime,’ the analogy stemming from the photographer’s preoccupation with an emptied and deserted world. Dereliction and development are coterminous. Our world is at once a projected ideal as it is the site of an aching deprivation. Therein lies the pathos in de Knoop’s paintings – their haunted and haunting quality. However, there is an upside, for what matters profoundly to de Knoop is art as ‘an offering pf psychological restoration and human acknowledgement.’ Invisible realms must be seen, human life understood as an aggregation of neglect-denial-hope. De Knoop’s paintings are not only personal expressions of a failing or ignorance, it is a desire – kinetically, emotively – for the broadest social connection. If Welgemoed and Martin seek an effervescent luminosity, an inner light, then de Knoop, in turn, is drawn to a sharp ‘interplay between light and shadow, that speaks to a world shaped through an inherent duality – everything is composed of an opposite.’
If the art of chiaroscuro is vital in the paintings of de Knoop, these sharp distinctions are dispersed under the harsh African light that infuses Maluleke’s paintings. Perhaps high noon is the defining hour in his paintings? Certainly, there is an irradiation that eschews overly sharp contrasts. Instead, we are caught in a moment, a setting, a geography distinctively rural or pastoral. Because of the surface Maluleke uses – a grass mat – smoothness is exchanged for grit. The artist is not concerned with luminous depth or effervescence. While the European tradition of the picturesque landscape plays its part, Maluleke’s take is rudimentary – we find ourselves in a scene which we in turn must navigate, we enter into the artist’s world. The painting provides no psychological pull, because no presumption on the part of the artist ever supposes that the viewer either knows or recognizes the world that is painted. As such, the impact is distanced, even anthropological – one enters an unknown world, a sharply articulated elsewhere. Black African custom has a vital role to play, not only in the collective culture represented, but in-and-through its medium, the grass mat, used for sleep, daily routine, ritual, and prayer. One cannot overlook ‘materiality’ in this regard – the artist’s innovative retooling of a medium designated for entirely other uses. In this regard, Maluleke’s art follows an innovative peculiarly African capacity to reenvision products deemed quotidian, which, when seen laterally, allow for a fresh perspective.
Frans Thoka, as well known for his innovative reuse of the grey and white striped miners’ and prisoners’ blanket, now returns to a classic South African staple – drawing. Universally recognized in the art of William Kentridge, monochromatic drawing was, and remains, the poor artist’s resource. Charcoal on paper is the shortest route to expressive clarity. In Thoka’s case, we find a recurrence of the interface of psychology and land, the embodied black being in a benighted African landscape. For, doubtless, Thoka’s vision never loses sight of the land as a site of dispossession, a land, as such, haunted by loss. In this regard, his art markedly differs from Maluleke’s, for no pathology clings to the latter’s paintings. A bucolic conveyance of an everyday world is Maluleke’s vision, while for Thoka it is a night-world, psychologically speaking, that is pervasive. There is no high noon in Thoka’s drawings or works in textiles. However, as Nietzsche reminded us, both a high noon and midnight are requisites for growth. ‘Midnight is a time of introspection and confronting the depths of existence, while noontide is a moment of potential and striving for a higher form of being.’ Probing and aspirational, Thoka and Maluleke’s drawings and paintings signal contrasting yet profoundly linked drives in an uncertain and vexed world.
Lastly, we have the drawings in charcoal and sculpture by Henrico Greyling. The drawings are beatific pastoral scenes seemingly devoid of any unrest. Created on fibre cement, they explore ‘themes of transformation, memory, and spiritual resonance,’ the last conveyed through the symbolic sheep. If Christian faith is central to the drawings, it is because they are impelled by ‘quiet vulnerability and guided trust.’ ‘The sheep are not merely subjects but stand-ins for the human condition, suspended in a landscape that is both physical and allegorical.’ In no uncertain terms, Greyling is relaying a narrative about God’s people, a sheep the embodiment of the pure, flawless, holy. As such, Greyling’s vision of humanity, unlike Thoka’s or Maluleke’s, is a projected ideal. However, it is the process of their making that is especially intriguing. Through ‘a repetitive process of drawing and pouring water over the drawn surface – a ritual act that references baptism,’ Greyling’s art gestures towards ‘surrender, cleansing and renewal.’ His is the art of the supplicant. However, it is the interplay of impurity and purity, disfiguration and figuration which, subtly, evokes a core tension. ‘The resulting marks – drips, smears, and stains – disrupt the image while embedding evidence of process and passage,’ because, of course, an idealized vision remains caught in the processual, the absolute cannot avoid change. As Greyling elegantly phrases it, the drawing ‘becomes both a landscape and a threshold: a place where the spiritual, material, and ephemeral converge.’
This notion of landscape and threshold evocatively conveys Cullinan’s core vision. For a landscape is not merely that which we see, appraise at a distance, or that which sutures us, by acknowledging out centrality in its construction, but because, more precipitously, it allows us to stand between worlds, upon a threshold. As Cullinan notes, The Imprint of Elsewhere ‘explores the liminal space between inner and our landscapes, where the seen and the felt, the past and the present, converge.’ This insight pertains to all the artists discussed. Precarity need not signal dread, it can be profoundly rewarding. And here, to conclude, we must consider Greyling’s poignant reflection on his astonishing and precipitous stone sculpture:
Poised upon a single point,
I lean into stillness,
not by strength,
but by grace.
What seems unshaken
speaks not of weight,
but of wonder –
of the quiet echo
between the seen and the believed.