Reviews

Can a leopard change it spots? Or a painter his splotches?
When it comes to landscape painting there is one master in this neck of the woods and that is undoubtedly Greg Schultz. Now, having bravely quit the security of a full time job as an art lecturer, Schultz is fully invested in doing the thing he loves the most
- making art. His exhileration is evident in his latest body of work. His subject matter has expanded beyond the land in which this Eastern Cape painter is so thoroughly immersed, to the sea. Similar to his approach to painting his environment, which he does not do from a position of dominanance but rather of immersion and seeking to understand, Schultz also does not presume to knock the sea into submission. Rather he responds - even plays - with small segments of it and delivers essence rather than the surface. But my big question has not been about Schultz's land/seascape painting ability, over that there is no doubt. Rather, what I wanted to know, was whether this painter could shift gear and if so, could he pull it off.
He took his first steps in this direction towards the end of last year when he and local multi–media designer Andrew Mogridge produced a video clip of Schultz, in Yves Klein style, burning his paintings. The burning is not intended to incinerate the work, but to create a texture. The video clip was encouraging and clearly a step in the right direction, but still I wondered, would he, could he, make the necessary leap. So it was with great anticipation earlier this week that I made the trip down a terrifying dirt track that leads to the Schultz family home and studio on the banks of the Kwelera River.
There his newest landscapes and seascapes, large and small, stood ready to go Grahamstown. Being in one room with a bunch of Schultz paintings is a bit like being an alcoholic in a vinters, a sensory delight awaits at every turn of the head. But then I spotted something that was not discernably Schultz - little scribbles and marks on the wall itself, the tracks of a flicking of a paintbrush and a stick of charcoal, as lively, nimble and as light as a Russian dancer. Schultz was playing around with gesture and the wall was part of the canvas for an animation. I became wildly excited but even then NOTHING prepared me for the animation, The Go - Betweens. The only way to even start beginning to describe it is to say think William Kentridge. Not only in terms of monochromatic stop-frame approach, but also in terms of what author Chris Spring describes as Kentridge's interest in the physical and metaphysical qualities of light, dark and shadow and "using them as ways of thinking about the world and about perspectives gained or lost in the passage of time". Last year East London academic Dr Gary Minkley, drew a fascinating parallel between Schultz and Kentridge whose landscapes are seen as a form of 'radical pastoralism'. The genre of pastoral painting traditionally serves as an archive of human history and memory - but is largely barren when it comes to the "furnishing the inscape of the soul". But Kentridge's landscapes notes Minkley are seen as "doing South African pastoral otherwise".
"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'."
Schultz's environment is vastly different to Kentridge, but the similarity between the two artists is that both have succeeded in harnessing fugitive forces like energy, fear and eroticism. In guiding his viewers to ancient truths and sacred places Schultz had also produced a profoundly significant, yet 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." These comparisons are still apparent, perhaps even more so than ever.
The Go - Betweens with its flickering glimpses of birds, feathers and tumbling eagles interspersed with the flames of Schultz's canvass burning process, and an astonishing soundtrack composed by the astonishingly talented Mogridge, who also filmed this mesmerizing artwork. It reaches far below the surface of the conscious and into the essence and guts of our collective African identity - with all its rawness and beauty. Schultz by far, far exceeded my hopes and expectations. His has not been a gear shift but a quantum leap. Evidently an Eastern Cape landscape painter can change his splotches.

Go Betweens Review

The Go-Betweens - Review

Flight, fire and fluidity - Heidi Salzwedel

As one walks along Somerset Street during the busy Grahamstown Festival, following the walls plastered with posters, one particular poster rears its head out from amongst the throng of paper. The paintings on the poster are rather vivid, bright red and earthy browns, it makes the tired and over indulged art viewer consider seeing one more exhibition. Before one even enters the exhibition space, the peaceful, rhythmic music playing in the gallery can be heard as the viewer climbs the stairs and round the corner. The gallery is an open and inviting carpeted space, it is not cold and clinical, nor does it threaten a cramped viewing experience. On first impressions, the viewer is refreshed by invigorating hues and the body of works’ strong presence. They command a closer observation.
A mixed media piece, Guardians of the Passage, immediately draws the viewer’s attention. Its sheer difference in spatial design to the rest of the exhibition allows one to observe its geometric quality made up of knobwood protrusions. These are arranged in single file lines on a square canvas. They do, however, produce a circular rhythm which emerges from the square surface as a result of their progressive size variations. The knobs rise out of a textured and wax laden canvas which has been manipulated by actual bees, thus producing a texture which the human hand cannot reproduce (Schultz , interview:2008). It is strikingly reminiscent of Jeremy Wafer’s Orange Disc produced in 1994; South Africa’s year of socio-political transformation. Wafer’s disc also displays earthy tones, and references body scarification and amasumpa bumps on Zulu beer drinking vessels. Lola Frost (2001: 24) asserts that there is a sense of classicism “through order, balance, synthesis and transformation”. This sense of visual balance and order is accentuated by the raised bumps which seem to coerce the viewer to their surface. A similar sense of classicism and coercion to the artwork is evident in Schultz’ piece, however, he alludes to the practices of another Southern African culture; the Xhosa tradition. Guardians of the Passage seems to advocate order and healing. According to the artist (2008), knobwood is used by the traditional Xhosa culture for ritualistic and medical remedies. The universal use of knobwood is also shown in the piece Muti-Scar, which seems unusually simple or elementary, but on closer observation, pulls the viewer into its textured rendition of a knobwood branch set against a backdrop of jarring red.
The fire element of the exhibition’s title, Go- Betweens; flight, fire and fluidity, rings true in Schultz use of fire as a medium ,both in the actual process of making many of the pieces, and also in the symbolic value of fire seen in Muti-Scar’s red backdrop. The majority of the pieces make use of brilliant red which is typically Schultz and characteristically reminiscent of fire. This is seen in the landscape, Morgan’s Bay, which illustrates the set of stately Eastern Cape cliffs with a thin film of red superimposed over the left third of the painting. Both Bird’s Code 2 and Bird’s Code 3 make use of thin red lines which rhythmically trace out the contour of numerous birds which seem to interact with one another. Their communication possesses an element of the Romantic sublime , breaking down any preconceptions that the picturesque is required when landscape art is produced. Schultz certainly doesn’t opt for ‘pretty pictures’ to adorn a wall.
Both Bird’s Code 2 and Bird’s Code 3 address the exhibitions’ thematic concerns with flight. Birds possess something which man does not, and possibly never will. Obviously the human fascination with flying has pervaded thought, literature and art for centuries (interview 2008), however, to a lesser extent, artists have tried to explore the relationships birds share. This is uniquely evident in a small oil painting on the back wall in the corner of the exhibition; Mediator’s Shift. Usually size matters, but this time it doesn’t. This quaint little piece demands a closer look as it accurately represents the artist’s fascination with the intrinsic peacefulness of a bird. The depiction of two flocks of birds flying shows the bird to be a swift messenger. Perhaps the most significant depiction of a bird’s qualities can be seen in the short stop-animation film. He clearly incorporates an element of Kentridge type illustration into the exhibition in the charcoal drawings which make up the film. He materialises the static motion of the paintings into actual flight. The video explores imagery of land, birds fighting, flying, feeding, and waiting yet also shows their solidarity- togetherness. The piece is played for interested viewers several times a day in the gallery space.
Motion is further captured in artworks which try to discover the thematic concern of fluidity. In The Gates 4 one gets the sense that, as the viewer, you could possibly be stationed in a rowing boat, sailing downstream, through a set of gates which are represented by paper collage on either side, into an unknown destination. The piece emits a tone of slow motion and peaceful fluidity, however, in this instance, the viewer is brought face to face with subjectivity and the temptation to over-interpret a piece. In the artist’s opinion, he prefers to present the viewer with an open-ended artwork, allowing this multiplicity of meaning .This reiterates the figurative notion of fluidity in the artist’s outlook on the world and the fluid, open-ended nature of each potential viewer interpretation. ‘A dry stick breaks’, it is better to see where an art piece takes you and to allow change than to be stuck within preconceived rigid ideas (Schultz, interview: 2008).
The viewer rounds the last corner of the gallery and comes to the end of the exhibition. One is engrossed by the frequency of textured surfaces in Go-betweens. Like Anselm Kiefer, an inspiration to the artist (Barkhuizen, date unknown), Schultz uses highly textured surfaces which jump out at the viewer. The textures and universal fluidity contribute to an overall tone, an exhibition personality which feels cyclic and is remarkably circular in meaning.

׀ Login