Reviews

Along ancient paths into sacred spaces - by Dawn Barkhuizen : Daily Dispatch

A meditation with nature and the memory

IN September last year East London landscape painter Greg Schultz won worthy honour in his home town with Panacea, his first ever local solo exhibition.

This year he set his sights on the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown and here, for your eyes only, is a sneak preview from Presence of Place.

In his new body of work Schultz expands on his “reassessment of our relationship with nature and landscape” and also the relationship between culture and nature.

Centrepiece is Searching Ancient Truths, a magnificent oil painting that has been the source of friendly debate between the artist and myself. Last year I told him he would have a mother of a job trying to improve on Old Man;s Karma, an exceptional painting of the Kwelerha.

About a week ago I got my first glimpse of Ancient Truths.

Well was it, or wasn;t it, he wanted to know?

What I didn;t realise was that I would have a mother of a job trying to answer him.

Critical to making a decision like that is trying to understand what the art is about.

For its full impact Ancient Truths needs to be considered within the context of the entire exhibition. Schultz has included a number of found-objects, mainly sticks, that he collected while walking through his home environment, the Kwelerha estuary, and along the province;s east coast. He describes the objects as “hidden and revealed, bound and free, carved, whittled, inlaid, stained and sealed.

“The objects have been collected and bound, indicating the passing of time, a meditation with nature and the memory of a particular place,” explains Schultz.

He then proceeded to make a number of simple watercolours that also appear on exhibition.

Through this process Schultz has, says East London academic Dr Gary Minkley , followed what Carol Armstrong calls a “strategy of dilation – an operation internal to the substance of the image, an opening up from within the heart of its matter”.

Simply put, Schultz, somewhat like the German romantic landscape painter Caspar Friedrich but perhaps more forcefully, has uncovered an essence – the atmosphere and the spirit of the place.

And he has done it so successfully that the viewer almost feels the energy of the earth pulsating from Ancient Truths.

Not only that but he has also, with his simple, traditional methods, connected medium and message with far greater impact than many of the contemporary artists who are resorting to technology for impact or effect.

Unlike the colonial landscape artists like Thomas Baines who paint from the position of explorer/conquerer, Schultz;s approach is more like the ancient Japanese landscape painters who saw themselves as part of the landscape, integral, but never dominating it. A particularly interesting feature of Ancient Truths is the focal point – a wild strelitzia. Unlike the ordinary strelitzia synonymous with coins and official publications representing “the Republic”, the wild strelitzia dominating the landscapes of Eastern Cape reserves was literally seen as a “Native plant; and, as a result, largely ignored, says Minkley .

Schultz;s use of the image rightly elevates the value and beauty of all things indigenous, untamed – and in doing so pays homage to his home province. Another feature of this work are the rock formations, ledges and outcrops – with such overwhelmingly rich surfaces that words cannot do justice to the marks and textures.

Minkley draws a fascinating parallel between Schultz and William Kentridge whose landscapes, he says, are seen as a form of “radical pastoralism”.

The genre of pastoral painting traditionally serves as “an archive of human history and memory” – but these works are largely barren when it comes to “furnishing the inscape of the soul”.

Kentridge;s landscapes, however, are seen as “doing South African pastoral otherwise”, according to Minkley . Through confronting “the despoilation and ransacking” of the Reef, the highly acclaimed Johannesburg-based artist proves that land “holds within it things other than pure nature.

“… for Kentridge ... embedded within the rock … are memory layers… 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.” Clearly Schultz;s environment is vastly different to that of Kentridge. The Eastern Cape wilderness “is not the place of mine dumps, shafts, pylons and power lines, crash barriers and culverts, where industrial incidents can be plotted”. Rather it is “the kloof, the tree, and the forest and the river that has defined the place,” says Minkley .

The similarity between the two artists is that both have gone beneath the surface, both have succeeded in harnessing fugitive forces like energy, fear and eroticism.

In guiding his viewers to ancient truths and sacred places Schultz has, says Minkley , produced a body of work that is a profoundly significant, albeit different form of radical pastoralism.

“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.”

So back to the question. Is it, or isn;t it better than Old Man;s Karma? In all honesty, it is a question that I am still unable to answer.

Schultz has managed to evoke the raw guts and energy of our wilderness in a way unlike any artist that I have ever seen.

He has loaded it with complex, fluctuating tensions – from a dread of the unknown to euphoria.

He has also combined the ancient with the present and perhaps even the future – using just a palette and a brush. Anyone able to do all of these things, in my view, is a national treasure.