Casa Labia: Seeking Eden, the 3rd exhibition in the Bloom series

by Philip | Jan 14, 2015 | News | 0 comments

Lucinda Jolly reviews Seeking Eden, the third exhibition in the Bloom series an exhibition of mixed media works curated by Margie Murgatroyd at the Casa Labia until February 22.

“The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.” ― Marcel Proust

In the course of the year, the exhibition goer has been exposed to all sorts of shows. From deep, dark and meaningful – and sometimes demanding exhibitions – to the obscure, quirky and edgy. The work of artists both well established and those on the rise. But come the end of the year, retinal appetites are inclined to shift. The viewer may want to kick back a bit and be more open to stimulus of a lighter more digestible kind. Perhaps something with a dash of irreverence or wicked humour.

The exhibition Seeking Eden is a great fit. It is a giant, festive season cracker of a show. Its Puffader fat with the work of 50 artists from ceramicists and painters to jewellers and photographers. It includes the work of big names such as Deborah Poynton and Stephen Inggs to the up and coming and the lesser known. It may not be deep and meaningful- although there are moments- but the work is of a high quality and it’s well curated. Curator Margie Murgatroyd confesses, with an air of regret, to having a tendency to turn heavy stuff into something light and harmonious.

Murgatroyd originally conceptualised Seeking Eden as “as a response to a perceived sense of longing for a place that does not exist; a yearning for an ‘edenic’ state of being”. And respond the artists did. Seeking Eden may contain works that refer to traditional ideas of Eden but are not necessarily confined to it and are more likely to be an evocation than a direct translation. Whatever our belief system, our notion of Eden will be a highly personal interpretation. As in many exhibitions, trends emerge. Seeking Eden is no different. Tondo’s or circular paintings abound as do moths, insects not usually associated with paradise.

This particular Eden is approached from the staircase of a 1930’s grand old architectural dame with a Venetian treatment, the Casa Labia. Positioned across the way from an ocean known for its unusual phenomena of waves that form in perfectly straight lines, the Casa Labia is an ideal ground for paradises lost because it belongs to an idyllic, bygone era. Large dramatic indigenous flower arrangements placed at intervals on the stairs- one complete with a just visible faux serpent, proclaim the nature –the drama and flourishes of humour- of the Eden to come.

The first of the 4 rooms housing the exhibition sets the tone. The top note here is mastery and one which is provided by Deborah Poynton’s painting and conceptual prowess.

Deborah Poynton

Her painting Picture 1 of a lusciously vegetated kloof barely illuminated by a few rays of distant light penetrating cloud and entered by an almost concealed wooden gate. It is well placed across from Karin Daymond’s Karoo painting series Against the Wind and in the same room as Christine Bryers’s sacred geometry Fynbos. The works in this room are connected by both the fineness of their surfaces and their use of similar tonal palettes. Poynton’s painting may appear to be about a sublime Eden with reference to the emotionally stirring Romantic tradition but her work also introduces its other side, Dystopia. Poynton draws us in by seducing us with her surfaces and at the same time gently mocks us for the folly of our arousal ,reminding us, just as the title does, that painting like Eden, is just an illusion on a 2- dimensional surface.

In the next room is a group of work connected by their monochromatic tonality. Here you’ll find Stephen Inggs’s large black and white photograph of immense Karoo space defined by the presence of a solitary archetypal tree, Barbara Wildenboer’s smoky moth tondos, Astrid Dahl’s large seething organic ceramics barely contained by their whiteness and Harris Steinman’s melancholy photograph of single fly on bruised flowers.

Next to this is a small room showing jewellery and Willemien de Villiers curious embroideries. Here you’ll also find Liz Vels’s delicate, thready, mixed media work titled The Greening and Catherine Glenday’s Vessel which complement each other beautifully.

The passage area on the way to the final room holds various pieces of jewellery and objects d’art and Hanien Conradie’s quietly dramatic, glowing flower series. Religious tracts and science both have it that before Eden there was the void sometimes known as the pregnant void. The delicate blooms on Conradies’s small unframed canvases seem to emerge from a dark background as if from an alchemical bath, the way the image on photographic paper emerges lying submerged in its chemical tray. It’s highly suggestive of what the Vedic monks are said to have the sensitivity to experience – the point at which matter rises from the void to become form.

Then it’s into the riotous fray of the last room with it’s bright colour and playfulness and the Edenic stereotype. Here you’ll find naive styles of Zimbabwean Marvellous Mangena, Carol Mangiagalli and the fresh, painterly abstracts of Cathy Layzell and Jill Trappler. Plus Adams and Eves who come in assorted races and mediums. Some are knitted as In Peta Becker’s others in the case of Maureen Visagie, are fashioned from stoneware. Ardmore’s hallmark of the unusual and exceptional craftsmanship charms with boats of wild animals and riders of giant overfed mongooses.

But even within the colour and humour of this group there is a dark reminder by David Bellamy of the role of the human in the destruction of natural paradises. The work , ” David and his dog Clive’s contribution & Clive Bellamy, Andrew Lord, E. Bianchini, Land Claim, Cape Parrots (Poicephalus Robustus” is as complicated a collaboration as the title suggests. Its base is a mediocre canvas painted by E Bianchini onto which Andrew Lord has painted the small bright Cape Parrots. In this work Bellamy mourns the endangered Cape Parrots and speaks for a non- human species “whose ancestral lands were seized during the colonial period by invading humans” and his canine son Clive.

As Murgatroyd writes, Seeking Eden explores the question of how we ‘re-wild’ the psyche and it is obvious but often ignored that we can only rewild the psyche if we protect the natural edenic spaces .

Look out for illustrator Sarah Pratt’s quirky illustrations including They Missed the Last Balloon to Eden, 2014