Alongside Eclectica Design and Art, director Shamiela Tyer, has opened another gallery, Eclectica Contemporary, reports Danny Shorkend.
This new gallery is also located in town and its first exhibition opener, curated by Andrew Lamprecht, is inspiring to say the least.
What works is the fact that the space is interesting: there is the chic, shiny white wall polemic as well as the grunge-like New York effect, which I imagine may be used for more new media, experimental art. If the surfaces and nooks and crannies of the gallery itself are intriguing, then the surfaces that “decorate” its walls are even more captivating.
When one makes ones way downstairs into what I would term the “alternative” space, Pauline Gutter’s enigmatic portraits strike one. Her inquiries into faces that emerge are quite alluring, at once irrational in their curious distortions and yet it appears that they consciously struggle against inertia. It is titled the “Shadow Barriers” series, an apt reference I would suggest to the unreality of material existence, that is, that matter is itself a shadow, an attenuation of the energy that gives substance form in the first place. That is, the faces are at once vibrant and alive as well as being tormented, dissolving out of existence, a mere shadow and a desire for sleep, that great void. This in turn is a reference to unconscious forces, an irrational desire not to participate in the humdrum of mundane existence. Yet, as the paint, so to speak, struggles, so conscious and deliberate life-giving impulses will not give way to death, destruction and simply fading into irrational oblivion, wherein one sees the world as merely a construct of ones own mind.
Sepideh Mehraban’s intriguing style focuses on her experiences growing up in Iran. Just as woman there are to be veiled, so here paintings reveal – if that’s the right term – the process of covering over and concealing. Arabic letters are painted over; the text is overlain by the sweeping brushwork. And the brushwork itself is a complex process of strokes over strokes. At the end, often a greyish-black or whitish-grey marks the overall surface and one such painting is marked by a separation of rectangles, as if newspaper clippings are both revealed and erased. Or in other terms, as if the text is reduced to an all-over homogenization, so that it cannot be read. In not being read it is either inscrutable or mysterious. In either case, the veil neither reveals nor conceals. There is but a surface.
Asanda Kupa’s acrylic works is perhaps simply a positive reminder of the joys in South Africa, even in townships, that hardships can be surmounted with collective cooperation and artistic expression. There is the sense of celebration amidst backgrounds and surfaces that also seem to dance; even more sombre areas or figures that have not joined in are part of the picture. I particularly enjoyed Jeannette Unite’s work. Her interest in mining on many levels – humanitarian, scientific and artistic – is refreshing and practically produces art works that shimmer, pulsate and glow (with metaphysical intensity?) with the sense of these energising chemical processes outside of the standard oils and acrylics, while not losing resonance with the subject at hand – mining in South Africa. The dual reality that mining both unearths the earths’ (South Africa’s) resources and riches and is the cite for much pain and misery in this country.
Benon Lutaaya’s work demonstrates his mastery of collage-techniques. His “Mindful” expresses the obvious sense of unity amidst fragmentation, but in addition there is the perception of both formation and deformation. This latter point refers to the simultaneous sense of breaking apart and gathering within in order to construct. How does one charter new territory when there is the constant construction and deconstruction or centring and decentring? Robert Muchatuta perhaps answers this.
Robert Muchatuta’s, “A discussion about the freedom in the dark” is powerful, because it evokes, in my opinion, many possible meanings, a playful realm of possibility, whereas many other works are more literal. Is it a parachute, a phallic symbol, a lantern, a jellyfish, an early form of life or perhaps a future kind of life-form…? And this playful complexity, this possible realm of association is echoed in the joyous, strong and determined sense of paint-work, a sense of urgency to conjure and to find this form, a form that itself can be many forms. It is like the difference between a Freudian notion that all is reduced ultimately to sexual impulses and that of Jung, wherein all cannot be reduced to one foundation, but can have multiple meanings, layers and levels.
WHERE: Eclectica Contemporary 69 Burg Street, Cape Town 8001
WHEN: Until August 27th
Review by DANNY SHORKEND first appeared in the Cape Times
