This new body of work by Schultz is described as a reassessment of
our relationship with ‘nature’ and ‘landscape’.
Through the act of walking, objects collected and bound, hidden and
revealed, bound and free, carved, whittled, inlaid, stained and
sealed.
Simply made souvenirs at a campsite, river, forest, or in a studio,
where the memory of the found-objects’ place occurs
A fusion of the past and the present time occurs between the
objects, drawn and painted, atmosphere and spirit of place, defining
and renewing perceptions about the relationship between nature and
culture
There is a story Greg tells about growing up on the Kwelera: the
visual core of much of his work (and the name derived from ‘Goerecha’,
‘bushman’ for ‘many aloes’): across the river, over ‘Old Man’s
Karma’ and up the cliff-face, there is a cave, hidden and largely
inaccessible. It is filled with dassie skulls. Once, long ago,
someone left a (WW2?) survival pack in it. In different moments, the
cave evoked the ‘space of bushmen’; the sacred stillness of the
place of water, cut by the river below; the grave remains of small
unnamed lives and amidst these, the material remnants of an imagined
fugitive. The story is of a climb, a discovery (matches, a water
purification tablet, some cloth), a re-arrangement (of skulls,
smallest to largest, unknowingly named to different species) and a
moment of belonging, a presence of place that was not so much
layered as inter-linked. Years later, a return to the cave across
the Kwelera, revealed a vanishing, an erosion, a destruction,
practically cleaned out and replaced with a localized economy of
eco-tourist capital flow: ‘Arena was here’.
It was, for him, and from such a tiny rocky floor a moment to ‘think
continents’, of seeing the world as a series of interlinked critical
habitats and sacred spaces acquiring visuality through a moment of
rupture and of erasure.
Schultz’s reinvestment of drawing, graphic trace, and medium in an
era of postmedia (as described by Rosalind Krauss with reference to
the work of William Kentridge) entails an aesthetic commitment that
refuses a complicity with a globalization of the image in the
service of capital (in the international fashion of installation and
intermedia work); and an understanding, or embracing of the idea of
‘differential specificity’ in order to re-articulate the etiolated
forms of the traditional medium of painting and sculpture.
While this body of work – Presence of Place – is conceptual, with
its prevalence of the readymade, contextual interventions and
‘documentation’ of the processes, it remains primarily an engagement
with the traditions and expressive medium of landscape painting and
drawing, but in new ways. In this sense Siopis has recently argued
that painting can be better understood “as an autographic practice
that shapes inanimate pigmented matter, references
two-dimensionality in some manner and contains an element of
performativity”. She suggests, then, this opens the ways for
thinking about the possibilities of painting not as orthodoxy, but
as “… a conflictual, heterogenous and resolutely embodied form of
mediation, which can shape, suggest and materialize the inner world.
It can find provisional form for difficult to visualize and fugitive
forces such as energy, excitement, terror, fear, eroticism.” These
concerns are animated, then, by the tension between paintings
readymade history and discursive framing, and the space it opens for
imaginative, affective invention.”
It is this ‘inner world’ here mediated through that of landscape and
‘nature’ that, I think, marks this work as of profound significance
– of a different form of ‘radical pastoralism’ that draws on
(indebted to), but is different from the work of others. Thus, while
Kentridge’s landscapes are seen as the ‘art of doing South African
pastoral otherwise’ (as Apter so aptly describes them), as a
practice where “despoliation and the ransacking of land make for
what Kentridge calls ‘a desperate sort of naturalism’”, the place of
the highveld, the mine and the industrial and engineering incident,
(and Kentridge’s own autographics) – the (pre)sense of place are
central. Here nature – as celebrated landscape singularities (as
kloof, escarpment, tree) or even of it as threatening/ primal, etc -
is supplanted by that of human intervention and devastation ‘as
great as any geological shifts’ and of ‘projections onto the land’,
making nature vulnerable (in an important inversion of one trope of
Empire) to ‘man’. Apter says “Kentridge’s bid for empirical banality
in his ‘naturalistic drawings’ of the South African veld prove that
land ‘holds within it things other than pure nature’”.
[It is this sense of the landscape as an archive of human history
and memory, but where the pastoral furnishes no inscape of the soul,
(but rather through pictorial means to link the notions of
underground and repressed memory). Hence for Kentridge, “[e]mbedded
within the rock … are memory layers, fossilized like primordial
records of long extinguished species”. He can be seen to be “Coaxing
the suppressed history of South Africa’s violent past out of
geological formations” that are as much human as ‘natural’.]
Greg’s work, though, proceeds from a different presence of place. In
the Eastern Cape, it is much more the ‘natural beauty’ and the
‘reserve’ – as the site of nature/ rural/ tradition that are its
marks. In this respect it is the other of Kentridge’s projections,
but projections still the same, the place from where The Reefs
geology’s violent past ultimately resides. This is not the place of
mine dumps, shafts, pylons and power lines, crash barriers and
culverts, where industrial incidents can be plotted, but rather the
presence of their lack or absence. So, here, it is, or was, the
place where the kloof, the tree, and the forest and the river
defined place.
Of course, in-between these pasts, and the now present, are the
histories of the fence, the donga, the fields of sadness and the
constrained scatterlings of cattle, goats, sheep and humans. Here,
the work of Jeremy Wafer, for example, marks a different approach –
one concerned with, as David Bunn has so eloquently argued,
problematising the relationship of landscape affect and history in
order to interrogate the idea of the inscriptive surface (and
against the notion of the surface of the earth as an inscriptive
field willing to receive the march of History). As Bunn argues,
Wafer is concerned with the non-expressive seemingly rational
languages used to grid, map and describe evident patterns of the
earth: cartographic texts as a means of unsettling the apparently
natural relationship between place and emotion’.
Greg, though, returns to the ‘inscriptive surface’ of the earth in
order to interrogate place and emotion in a different manner, from a
‘differential specificity’. In this regard I think Greg follows what
Carol Armstrong has called a ‘strategy of dilation’ - an operation
internal to the substance of the image, an opening up ‘from within
the heart of its matter’. Paraphrasing Armstrong, the work involves
a series of visual enlargements (and opening ups, literally) (from
big picture, through the others to the objects, sculpted and drawn)
that connects objects (the material) and the pictorial, the then and
the now, the modern and the antemodern, and the medium and the
message in a trancelike slowing of intensified ‘dilation’ to an
expansive meeting between materialities and temporalities. It is
further marked – the ‘menstruum’ literally burnt on the major large
work, and internally re-framed, re-documented in different mediums,
bound, sculpted on – enabling the surface as something that shifts
as it comes between, “something that is at once boundary and
threshold, that both limits and permits communication and relation,
something that is as inherently social as it is inescapably
corporeal” . And, as the visual scale dilates towards the actual
readymade, increasing in visibility, the pictorial gives way to the
graphic, ‘wash’ing apart the concealed natural and sacred lost in
the landscape, into visible fragments, to the ‘already’ sculpted
objects (as is the land itself) of related shadow and light,
presence and place. These are expressive gestures: their
painterliness is clear – indeed compelling – and, through them, is
an immersion, affection toward and attraction to the world we
[might] inhabit, and which as a ‘mode of dilated awareness’ made
visible, which is of such consequence here.
Talking to Greg and visiting his studio – a self-constructed wood
and iron shed that holds a ‘local life-time’ of the material and the
visual – aspects of this process is more apparent. Walking,
traversing the landscapes of the Eastern Cape generate the found and
the readymade, gradually over months and years they are engaged and
sculpted, painted, drawn, recorded, when the properties and the
substance, slowed and opened up, seem to cohere. The paintings,
drawings and sculpted objects take on a different set of meanings
here, in dialogue, if you like, with the traces of a much larger
body of work. Across one wall, though, is the centerpiece of this
presence of place, his aesthetic of critical and sacred habitats.
Called ‘Searching Ancient Truths’, it frames and defines the forces
and relations of this ‘dilated awareness’ of presence and place.
“Searching Ancient Truths” has a surface presence, seemingly melting
off the canvas and frame in yellows and oranges that are both fire
and mist or fog, consuming and covering, like acid rain or volcanic
eruption what lies beneath. The iconographic potentialities of the
yellow/ orange produce a vision of a world that may arrive, a
narrative that you are about to enter from stage left at a velocity
far beyond the land’s capacity. It is cautionary. The potential
future of disaster, enveloped in the swirling density of an
encroaching molten volcanic fire-cloud, tacitly evokes the geologic
conditions that produce futures based on a society of destructive
velocity for the ‘natural’ (deriving from the inability to
acknowledge the ever-shifting relationships between ‘sacred
landscapes’, pasts and the skin of the earth). Yellow/orange warns,
it is the sign of the ultimate thing to come – death itself – if
ignored (if we think about the most public visibility of
yellow/orange, contained in the warning traffic sign of the robot).
This molten yellow lava cloud has extended into the sky and the
upper frame, and it bursts, leaches down, and across, from outside
the frame in runs and flows that are foreboding, tinged in red.
Further back, behind, etched in the land, are representational hints
of ancient histories and meanings, invoked through the almost
citational spirals of land art; the river, circling from its focal
point on the edge of the outer spiral, and drawing the bursts of
lava, flow ‘vortexically’ down towards it. This point is centrally
tied to these pasts, though, through the represented fore-grounded
found artifact that is both a sign of real practiced material
culture and of archaeological and museological investigation,
fascination and display.
The red pastel-like lines associate. In their marking of a
geometric, perspectival, almost architectural (built) connection
from the fluid water heart of the landscape, in the river, to the
round ‘work-stones’ the red pastel surveyor’s mark springs most
immediately to mind. The work-stones hover, like worlds, orbiting
the bottom frame of the landscape. Painted in difference, changing
angle, perspective and plane across the frame, are they an object or
objects in motion; one, or differing worlds? Are you drawn in? – by
and from them - towards a centre; or out, from a centre, to these
alternating changing orbiting worlds, whirling on strands of
attachment. And are these attachments of the red pastel surveyor’s
marks lines of colonial image projected onto the land; or are they
mimic lines, drawn from an imagined ‘other’ side? Imaged from a
colonized no-longer-visible world, the presence of place, the
materiality, experience and ‘spirituality’ of the land can only be
drawn back into the landscape from the traces of constantly
shifting/ changing views of the same rare found objects like the
‘work-stone’.
And in the near foreground – what is becoming Greg’s emblematic
references to localizing the landscape from within the tradition of
South African landscape painting - the rock, close up and the ‘wild
strelitzia’, in particular, are iconic. The strelitzia, a perennial
herbaceous plant (‘native to tropical Southern Africa’), whose genus
is named after ‘Charlotte of Meckenburg-Strelitz (1744-1818), queen
of Great Britain and Ireland’, and includes the ‘bird-of-paradise
flower’, was emblematic ‘in domesticated form’ of the settler
garden, the hallway vase and agricultural ‘flower show’. It also
made its way into the signage of settler nationalism, adorning
coins, official publications, public walls, swimming pools and the
representational of ‘the Republic”. Against this, the wild
strelitzia was ignored, effectively as its naturally untamed other,
and largely dominating the landscapes of the Eastern Cape reserves.
It was literally seen as a ‘Native plant’, and as such, could not be
isolated, and domesticated as ‘empty’ and pure nature, as it carried
ideas of process and history, of its indigeneity, its ‘native-ness’.
Greg’s use returns it here to representation, proposing that these
landscapes are both ‘native to’ and indigenous, and representational
of the local, the place and its presences.
And up close, the rock formations, ledges, outcrops and rock-faces
become virtual templates for the ‘long duree’ of geological
formations, bases from which to view time, places and pasts. And the
drift wood sculptures – the debris of the beach and the river –
equally resonate a sense that this land was once sea-bed, that its
memory, inscribed in rock and sand and tree – its underground if you
like – was subject to the movement of tides, currents and waves.
Here, also it is not the vision of pure nature, or ‘majestic primal
forces of rock and sky’ or the celebration of kloof and tree, (what
William Kentridge has described as paintings of landscape in a
‘state of grace’ and as ‘documents of disremembering’ – ‘the plague
of the picturesque’) but rather these visions subject to destruction
and re-remembering.
In a critical sense, then, Greg’s work asks us to re-consider what
we mean by nature, and also what the cultural meanings of nature
are, for it is never natural. But more that this, it also asks to
re-think what we mean by ‘the rural’. The starting point for this is
an observation made recently by Gayatri Spivak. She has reflected on
what she calls the ‘spectralization of the rural’ and has said:
“’the rural’ is not trees and fields anymore. It is on the way to
data’. In one sense she is suggesting that media and environment are
conceived as codes capable of mutual translation, and increasingly
that we are coming to see (envision) the rural through particular
representational forms and interests, often determined by global
financial and informational economies (from tourist and
environmentalist concerns through to those of actual tunnel
agricultural production systems and the like). But by
spectralisation, what I also understand it to entail, is the ways
that these influences constitute ‘the rural’ as the place of
emptiness – where there is ‘empty countryside and empty subjects’.
(and then as Apter suggests the ideas of ‘critical habitat’ can be
located as a margin of critique inserted in the space where this
translation process occurs).
I think this body of work offers us a margin of critique of the ‘spectralisation
of the rural’ as a longer and more mutual inter-connected, but also
changing process. For, in one critical sense, the ‘spectralisation
of the rural’ is located in visual forms of display. A key component
would be the forms of colonial representation and particularly those
found in landscape painting. The connection is well demonstrated in
the critique of this painterly tradition as one which empty’s
process and history from it through arranging a vision of ‘pure
nature’. Thereafter (or alongside), this spectralisation can be
located in the visual practices of the collection, classification,
reproduction and display of ‘nature’ in spaces like the museum. This
contact with the botanical, locates ‘nature’ as that of genus and of
science, emptying the coutryside and re-locating it in the field of
the specimen, to be viewed in the glass case, or through the
field-guide and museum display. A further related (and also partly
museological) emptying of ‘the rural’ takes place through its
translation into tradition and craft, which here empties ‘rural
subjects’ of agency and volition, in favour of their material
representations through beadwork, dress, and material objects. (of
course there are other ‘emptyings’ in the name of betterment,
development and the like)
Greg’s work enables us to locate these visual representations and
simultaneously re-imagine them in a way that re-emphasizes the
importance of trees and fields, of sacred and ancient spaces and of
‘the rural’ as the place where an aesthetics of critical habitats
resides.
These landscapes are not unmarked, they are made, much as are the
‘objects of archaeology’, orbiting the frame, and the extended ways
of ‘seeing differently’ through the whole show, and the movements in
and out of these ancient and sacred spaces.
To some extent Greg’s work has moved to making more explicit the
gathering, revaluating and redeploying of found objects. At first
glance they appear natural and random, seemingly ‘a-drift’ and
randomly collected on high tide lines and obscure bush-paths. On
closer engagement, though, they emerge as cultural artifacts,
gleaned in more intentional moments of imagination and attachment.
They are, then, “shards of culture” , inviting us to look at the
neglected, the overlooked (unnoticed) and the often over-looked
(ignored), the ‘natural banal’ and those objects lost on beaches and
river banks, and in the indigenous forests that compost – and in the
long term – constitute the very earth and its habitats. In part,
then Greg’s work is about ‘scrutiny’: of these inordinately ordinary
and natural objects and their ‘intellectual, emotional and
ideological [and one can add spiritual] processes whereby these
materials are comprehended and classified’ but also actually chosen
– catching the eye, picked up, held, viewed and collected and
finally valued. The tonal scale of the charcoal, watercolour and
gauche drawings of the objects warms to something like the
temperature of the living tissue with which the light that made it
came into contact, in the ‘liminal space between touch and sight’
and imagination. What emerges is not the emptying of ‘the rural’,
but the giving of life to the natural, and in the process, making
them objects of sacred and ancient memorial experience and visual
worth.
Emily Apter has argued that an ‘aesthetics of critical habitat’
applies to art informed by geopoetics, by an ecologically engaged
conceptualism (what the poet John Kinshella has called ‘radical
pastoral’ quoted above), that critiques the relationship between
media and environment and between presence and place. But it also
critiques – or offers a corrective to what Carol Armstrong has
called the ‘contemporary morass of erratic anti-aestheticism, all
stirred up as it is with an equally confused spectacularism (found
especially in the currently prevalent art of the multimedia, …)’ .
In this regard, the work asks us to take the aesthetic seriously and
offers a ‘sensuous’ apprehension, as a defining preoccupation of
human being - which ‘treats of the conditions of sensuous
perception’ (Kant)
I think it is worth, at this point, to think about ‘Presence of
Place’ as allegorical, as being indelibly marked by the passage of
time and the presence of death; and that also refuses the silencing
of nature. As Walter Benjamin has argued, allegory was born of a
“strange combination of nature and history”, whereby history had
“passed into the setting”, becoming legible in fragmentary guise
through natural forms and details of landscape. The history revealed
in this way is not the history of triumph of progress and human
advancement. Rather, nature is visible, as Stuart Mclean has argued,
in the guise not of permanence, but of decay and transience, a
condition disclosing at the same time, the actual historicity of the
seemingly natural and its consequent incapacity to serve as a stable
ontological ground’. (Mclean, p15). Thus as allegory, ‘Presence of
Place’ has a destructive and a redemptive aspect: on the one hand it
confirms the muteness of fallen nature; on the other it redeems
nature precisely by bestowing significance on it.
This process of composing – of figuring meaning both into and from
fragments, found here in the ways that the various works fragment
from and back into the whole ‘Presence of Place’ can be seen not as
a definitive subjugation of the material world, but rather as a
protracted struggle involving the constant risk of subversion. For,
behind the pieced together forms, lie alternative pasts. These
alternative pasts conjure up a world in which supernatural and
nonhuman agents continue to play an active role in both nature and
human events, a world that appears disconcertingly at odds with the
modern conception of the sovereign and self-authored human subject.
Put slightly differently, I think that what ‘Presence of Place’
offers are subaltern visions of a supernaturally endowed nature and
history, and a way of acknowledging their contemporary persistence.
Thus we, as humans are precariously interwoven with other ways of
knowing, including communion with spirits and the dead - the
searching ancient truths.
As such, Greg’s work is, in part, a quest for a different mode of
engagement, seeking to dwell on the silences and evasions of these
places of history as contemporary presences, and a provocation to
reconceive the here and now as the metamorphic interchanges among
history, nature and the supernatural. For to refer to Paul Valery
and Greg Dening, silence is the active presence of absent things.
Silence isn’t empty soundlessness. Silence is always a relationship.
Silence always has a presence in something else. Silence is
contingent on something we experience in another way. But can we see
silence, or more particularly these silences – these other ways of
knowing – in Presence of Place?
Quite figuratively, I think we can, and Greg helps us ‘catch the
contingency of silence in our imagination’, to see ‘those fine-lined
and faint webs of significance’.(Dening, 146) This happens, in part,
through the autographic processes of naming from the earlier ‘Old
Man’s Karma’ (and not a figure of an old man to be seen) through the
‘Aura Shifted’, ‘Bound Hope’, ‘Composed Presence’ and ‘Sacred
Source’ (to name a few) drawings, and the paintings anchored around
Searching Ancient Truths, but also through Ancestral Way, Request,
Natures Code, Found Place, Protective Offering, Objects of Presence,
and By Virtue of the Cliff, amongst many others. However, the
contingencies of silence in our imaginations are more caught through
the process of seeing these absent things in the dream-like, and
memory-like qualities of the paintings and the intimate sensual
detail of the drawings. Edges blur, landscapes melt, sculpted
objects float, colours seep and vision wavers between the
expressive, up close and the impressionistic haze of real distance.
And through all, these landscapes are peopled by their very absence,
by the silent visibility of accumulated layers of natural and human
pasts; of nature burnt, burnished, and sculpted; of memory, like
sculpted objects, lost and found, floating and stabilized in the
sandstones, shales and dolerite sheets and intrusions. And
everywhere the aloe, the wild strelitzia, the hypoxis, the boophane
and the paperbark, provide the fine-lines and faint webs of
alternative natural historical imaginations, as they open into
stories of ancient healing and association.
The memory of found objects occurs, then, as Greg suggests, at
places – a campsite, river bank, forest clearing, as well as (and
importantly, equivalently) a studio – when their presence is made,
and then seen. Let me say that again: the “memory of found objects
occurs at places when their presence is made and then seen”.
The insertion of these found objects tend to re-insert them into
conscious awareness, making them again visible. As such, they work
again as ‘present-at-hand’ objects and ask us to consider the being
of objects, tearing them from their invisible forest floors and
beaches and asking us to open another way of thinking of objects –
and their rumbling depths of being - as a possibility. It is, if you
like, opening everyday perception and everyday natural, found
objects to a secret life of things, which also unfolds beyond human
perception. As such, these objects, and their forms of
representation in Presence of Place – in the expansions of the
drawings, the free-floatings orbiting in the paintings, and in their
framings, and centrings in splashes, blocks and globes of colour -
seem to glow with inner lives of their own, that at once makes them
natural, sacred, of earth and sky that withdraws from human
awareness.
At the same time, the objects are sculpted and represented: bound,
magnified in scale, reduced in dimension (from object to drawing,
for example), coloured, and displayed – becoming performative –
‘Presence of Place’ invites an intensely close possibility: to both
see the inner lives of objects and that they cannot be reduced to
what we see of them. In other words, Greg reminds us that objects
are not something represented or physically present-at-hand, but are
actual entities which we constantly reduce to mere represented
objects of availability, to stockpiles of present-at-hand material,
to planetary en-framings, all with negative consequences. Against
this, Greg offers us a view that illuminates and celebrates (in
medium, in brush and pencil and in detail) the actual entities on an
equal footing and shows us a sense of the life of things amidst each
other and their practice of concealing secrets from humans. It is
these very ‘being of objects’ that Presence of Place evokes.
Facts, says Lorraine Daston, ‘… are hard and hard-hearted. They
stand stubborn and snarling against those who would twist and tweak
them; they are ruthless in puncturing illusions and fantasies,
however dearly held. If modern facts have an incarnation, it is as
rocks: hard, jagged plain rocks – the kind you might hurl at a
window or stub your toe against. They are the thugs of epistomology’
(p680). Daston, argues further that facts ‘defined as a ‘datum of
experience, as distinguished from the conclusions that may based on
it’ (Oxford English Dictionary) emerge in seventeenth century
natural history and natural philosophy as a self-consciously new way
of organizing experience. Insofar as possible, experience was to be
broken up into fragments that could be studied without necessarily
connecting them to other fragments or to any hypothetical
interpretation or explanation.
In thinking about Presence of Place, it seems to me, Greg asks us to
reflect on how this particular association has developed, and in so
doing, to re-consider what ‘facts’ are. In particular through giving
us ‘wonder-saturated rocks’ – that in their seeming triviality,
their distinguishability and in their granular and discrete
texturality, and in their very given-ness (they are given, not made)
which epitomises discovery rather than invention, a world found
rather than fabricated, Greg’s ‘rocks’ carry all the truth-to-fact
connotations, yet also introduce or contain ‘a sense of wonder’. As
such, they offer us the possibility of ‘wonder-saturated facts’ as a
means to re-learn and hold in memory things we have previously known
and become ignorant of.
‘Presence of Place’ offers us a space that we might consider to be
filled with ‘durational time’, enclosing a past located this side of
the forgotten, much closer to the present moment than any past, yet
incapable of being solicited by voluntary and conscious memory’.
(Langer, in Spiegel, p158) What durational time contains has always
been there, uncovered and then covered once more, the ‘long term’
layers of ‘stagnant histories’ that provide an archaeology of an
everyday lost. Greg’s paintings and drawings operate as sites of
memory in this durational time, illuminating discontinuity and
highlighting potential spaces that visualize a reflective nostalgia
for a everyday that is a locus of hidden poetics and subterranean
practices of wonder and association where pleasures rise to the
surface.
One site of these pleasures locate in the sensual and the erotic. It
is not possible to view this show as a whole, without being drawn to
the complex and engaged erotics of representation located in the
sculpted objects and the drawings. Desire, as a theme, seems to run
through Presence of Place and the associations between sex,
landscape, wonder and nature in the everyday are invoked. As Nadine
Botha has argued, ‘eroticism is not sex; it is the representation of
sex – the relic of sex. This representation can be guised in
metaphors and euphemisms that either tame or aggrandize sex, mostly
for arousal. Or sex itself can be the metaphor for another subject –
power, politics, psychology and such. In this form sex acts more as
negotiation’ (p35). Here, in Presence of Place, the erotics of
representation is not for arousal, and yet sex itself does not
operate or act as an explicit metaphor of negotiation. Rather,
located in-between is a sense that part of the sensuous and everyday
should be located in the sexual and the erotic and that this should
not be denied as a ‘fugitive force’ in constituting a presence of
place. Equally significantly, these associations also serve to
remind the viewer of the ways in which sex and desire locate in our
representations and meanings of landscape, objects and the
constitutions of nature itself, as the drawings open the erotic and
sexual space for ‘imaginative, affective invention’ and meaning.
So, to return, then, to the introductory comments, it is the ‘inner
worlds’ located in and through the drawings and paintings that make
up ‘Presence of Place’, mark its differential specificity,
re-articulate the traditions (of landscape paintings) in new ways,
and carry its profound significance as a major ‘new’ work in South
African and Eastern Cape landscape art for the future.
And in an equally significant moment of autographic extension, in
Greg’s studio, facing the cliffs and hearing the flood waters of the
Kwelera, the bees return to the paintings and their layerings of
fired beeswax, that frame and fire the landscapes of ancient truths,
bringing with them the promise of enduring and wonderous senses for
the future.
Dr. Gary Minkley: April 2007 |