trace (treis)n. 1. a mark or other sign that something has been in a place; vestige. 2. a tiny or scarcely detectable amount or characteristic. 3. a footprint or other indication of the passage of an animal or person. 4. any line drawn by a recording instrument or a record consisting of a number of such lines. 5. something drawn, such as a tracing. 6. Chiefly U.S. a beaten track or path. 7. the postulated alteration in the cells of the nervous system that occurs as a result of any experience or learning. See also memory trace, engram. 8. Geom. the intersection of a surface with a coordinate plane. 9. Maths. the sum of the diagonal entries of a square matrix. 10. Linguistics. a symbol inserted in the constituent structure of a sentence to mark the position from which a constituent has been moved in a generative process. 11. Meteorol. an amount of precipitation that is too small to be measured. 12. Archaic. a way taken; route. -vb. 13. (tr.) to follow, discover or ascertain the course of development of (something); to trace the history of … 14. (tr.) to track down and find, as by following a trail. 15. to copy (a design, map, etc) by drawing over the lines visible through a superimposed sheet of transparent paper or other material. 16. (tr.; often foll. by out) a. to draw or delineate a plan or diagram of. b. to outline or sketch (an idea, policy, etc.) 17. (tr.) to decorate with tracery. 18. (tr.) to imprint (a design) on cloth, etc. 19. (usually foll. by back) to follow or be followed to source; date back. 20. Archaic. to make one’s way over, through, or along (something). {C13: from French tracier, from Vulgar Latin tractiare (unattested) to drag, from Latin tractus, from trahere to drag} –‘ traceable adj. -,tracea’bility or traceableness n. –‘ traceably adv. –‘ traceless adj. –‘ tracelessly adv. 21. Angling. a length of nylon, or formerly gut, attaching a hook or fly to a line. Kick over the traces. 22. to escape or defy control. {C14 trais, from Old French trait, ultimately from Latin trahere to drag} And of course, tracer – as not only a person or thing that traces, but a projectile or ammunition, that can be observed when in flight by the burning of chemical substances in its base.

This exhibition comprises twelve 2,5 x 1,6 metre oil and mixed media paintings on canvas, and an associated animated film projection. It marks the culmination of Greg Schultz’s two decade long engagement with the landscape and its traces of the ethereal, marked in the landscape of the Eastern Cape, and more particularly the estuarine environment of the Kwelera River. Greg talks about these as moments of magic in air, water, fire and rock and as ‘glimpses’, leaving brief or incomplete views, or glimmers, of world’s unseen. The exhibition holds his traces of these tracings with which one might make one’s way over, through or along, or indeed go between these routes on a journey towards conditions of sensuous perception.

The paintings are large: huge expanses of intense productive labour and detail, alive with colour, movement, depth and possibility. They are ordered here in the sequence of their construction: from first to last. Looked at in this order traces a seemingly obvious route. Starting with the ‘One Hundred and Ninety Tins: Creative Cycle Part III’, the once tuna tins, then oil paint receptacles collected and used over 14 years, transforms into the opening artwork as one which traces both an end (of functional, commodity, food use) and a beginning, a tracing back to source for the paintings, with its emphasis on the actual paints and oils. They are the material traces, the vestiges of the ‘before the painting’ time; footprints of the passage of Greg’s work and a key symbol in the constituent structure of the exhibition, as they mark the position from which the constituent pigments and mixes have been moved in a generative process of painting creativity.

These traces, in turn, contain further traces: they copy, trace or draw on a formal modernist grid arrangement and its painterly conventions and traditions, and thus imprint, or delineate one genealogy of influence in Greg’s work; and as the tins will continue to rust over time, they ascertain a further course of development - they already contain (in the rust) tiny detectable amounts of movement and change, suggesting (as they rust further) a trail and a way taken to an unknown future.

If this concentration on just the first, and least painterly in the series of 12 seems exaggerated , given the subsequent nature of the paintings, let me suggest one further trace in the ‘One Hundred and Ninety Tins’ work that is of major significance in setting the overall tone of the exhibition: that of colour. Cezanne has suggested that in pigments, mixes and varnishes are the traces of the ‘secret soul of grounds’, and Michael Taussig has in a related sense invited us to think about ‘what wonder lies obscured within colour’. He asks ‘What colour is the sacred?’ and suggests that we might consider the ways that colour vision becomes less a retinal and more a total bodily activity in that we pass into the image while we are looking at it. As such, he encourages us to see colour as something alive, like an animal, or wetness or heat, or even weather, that propels you into the image. Once we are able to do this, he suggests, ‘we might never think the same about thinking again’. And it seems to me that this exhibition, and the senses of colour at work in ‘Pulse’, or ‘Sense’, or ‘Transfer’, ‘Sacred Wonder’ and ‘Trace’ and ‘Seek’ enables this passing into the image to ask these kinds of questions.

This is Taussig: “As our bodies change in a dangerous world now subject to global warming, color sense like heat sense detaches the senses from the complacent view of the body as a fortress with peepholes and antennae, sensing externalities, and instead encourages us to take a world-centred and not a self-centred view of such viewing such that the self becomes part of that which is seen, not a sovereign transcendent. To thus see ourselves in the midst of the world is to enter into ourselves as image, to exchange standing above the fray, the God position, for some quite other position that is not really a position at all, but something more like swimming, more like nomads adrift in the sea, mother of all metaphor, that sea I call the bodily unconscious.”

I am suggesting, then, that it is through Greg’s engagements with colour and colour sense, that similar invitations proliferate. He asks, invites, and almost always requires us to see ourselves in the midst of the world, as image, as swimming, or flying. I want to suggest that it is this extraordinary relationship between sense of colour, the wonder that lies obscured in it (fire, water, weather, ground) and it as alive, like an animal, bird (sacred ibis), or fish (grunter) and as a magical polymorphous substance tracing heat, or wetness, or flight and movement, that enables us, in front of these works, to pass into the image and to associate colour with his and our own sense of the sacred.

This is no small feat: and a wonderous trace that flows, moves, flies and shadows the paintings. If you look at them as a progressive whole, and enter them as if a nomad adrift in the sea, or as a swimmer, then it seems appropriate that we are asked to look at these paintings from a new vantage point as well. In essence, we are asked to look, not from the vantage point of the conventional landscape prospect; but from the vantage point of what I want to call the periscope.

Conventional landscape painting invites us to view landscapes in a very particular way, and I have suggested before that Greg paints against the ‘plague of the picturesque’ to give meaning, locality and indeed, history and belonging to the landscapes of home and the Eastern Cape. But he has also done that from within the conventions of landscape art, and the sense of a prospect – a vantage point outside, above, overlooking and ‘mastering’ the landscape has also been a mark with which Greg constantly works with, and against – going between convention and innovation and stability and change. This exhibition, too, has what we might call Greg’s reassuring and familiar ‘signature’ references – his own explicit traces back to his mooring posts - exemplified here most visibly by ‘Moon Path’ and by ‘Bird’s Code’.

What strikes me though, is how Greg has now moved the lens and point of the prospect to the periscope, and thus also moved us, in moving the site from which we view the land or sea represented in front of us. To me, it now feels more like the conventional prospect has become the periscope – itself an amazingly go-between or in-between looking device: seeing while unseen, looking out, as others might try to look for, within an unseen inside, below, subterranean. As such it is a radical view, and one that invokes an imagination of fluidity, liquidity and flow that is unique. It is perhaps from this periscopic view that we may best be able to see the possibilities (the traces) of the colour of the sacred, and equally locate the traces for entering a new bodily unconscious: what Taussig invites as the possibility to pass into the image as if a swimmer.

Go and stand in front of ‘Pulse’, or ‘Sense’ or ‘Sacred Wonder’ or even ‘Seek’. Over what does the water flow? Are we standing, sitting, lying? Could it be a whale? Are we on its back? Seeing with its eyes as it surfaces? Nomads? Perhaps looking behind? A submarine? Seeing through a periscope? We go between these possibilities and possible worlds. It is this in-between space and our relation to it; and the goings between worlds real and imagined, that seems to almost lap over the edges of the work. Standing in front of it, glancing down, a pool of water seems to form not on, but of the floor. Step forward and you are waist deep in flow and …; step back and you are submerged, fluidity in your body and your veins, immersed in a world beneath the surface of things. But what a surface if you hold your position – shimmering, gliding, sparkling – a sacred moment.

It is from this ‘inscriptive surface’ of water, rock, air, tree and cloud that Greg is able to interrogate place and emotion in a different manner, from a ‘differential specificity’. In this respect the paintings seem to both slow down and magnify a reduced detail of the landscape, allowing for a material and temporal enlargement of that moment. However in that densely somatic duration of the extended pause, stillness also becomes flow and movement, but in extraordinary new ways. Carol Armstrong has called this a ‘strategy of dilation’, whose operation is internal, not external, to the substance of the image, an opening up from within the heart of its matter. This connects the then and the now, the thee and the I, the medium and the message, in a ‘trancelike slowing of the famous fast time of modernity’, while simultaneously allowing for conditions of sensuous perception of different flows and forms of movement between boundary and threshold. This strategy of dilation, it seems to me, maximises the equivalences between the extension of the surfaces of the canvas and its ripple-like, mirror-like, skin-like, air-like, ground-like surfaces of paint (as well as its depth, or geological layers also often exposed by burning, in Seek, for example). The multiplication of senses in the dilated wonder of water, sky, rock, tree, bird; and its sacred colours of heat, wetness, coolness, and lightness are held open to an expanded viscosity of the human gaze as a meeting place, the place where ‘it/we meet(s) the world differently’ (as Armstrong puts it). This mode of dilated awareness, then, traces where the ‘intersection of a surface with coordinate plane[s]’ of real landscapes and ethereal/ magical/ sacred imaginaries resides. It is where we, for Greg perhaps, meet the world as sacred.

It is impossible to do justice to all the twelve works – they each seem to live, breathe, excite, and provoke wonder in differing and multiple ways. I have said nothing of ‘Mediator’s Pulse’, with its 6 231 plastic bread clips (that is seventeen years worth of one loaf of bread a day – a significant trace dating back a body of work); or ‘Constellation – Southern Cross’ offering a way home, as knobwood (zanthoxylum capense, also known as ‘umlungu mabele’ (white woman’s breasts)) thorns and ‘drawn lines’ trace the exact coordinates of the Southern Cross; a sea-trail that traces sailors paths home from the sea, while also resonating with the erotic racialised traces of the bodily unconscious; or of tracing, through fire and water, the earth’s surface in the sky. And think about ‘Sacred Wonder’ and track down the trace of the Sacred Ibis – a shadow – as the water swirls into wondrous abstractions of colour and light, making a mockery of the simple names white, cream, or blue.

Or, consider the painting ‘Trace’. It is number 11 in the sequence – although it seems like it should be the last painting, given both its title, and its form and content. Containing the most visible traces of the exhibition as a whole, and of the animated film projection (of which I have explicitly said nothing, but which resonates with association) it seems an apt summary and drawing together of much of Greg’s work. Scattered and scratched across the canvas of sky-light, are instructions, diagrams, numbers, fish flying, birds diving, flight paths, diagonals, arrows, angle dives, cycles and words: seemingly random, haphazard but also less so – reminders, remembrances, reflections, routines, re-collections: ‘ethereal’, ‘go-betweens’, ‘mediators’, ‘spiritual’, ‘flight sequence’, ‘great beyond’.

And so, finally to number 12, entitled ‘Seek’ a fitting end-point to the series, as it proposes a movement beyond ‘Trace’. It suggests the one aspect of the definition of trace I have not invoked – that of ‘escaping or defying control’, of ‘kicking over the traces’. With its extraordinary inversions and explosions of light and shadow the very clouds seem to be burning, melting, and alight, but with a gentleness of light that is compellingly sensuous. I literally feel vertigo, as I swirl and careen downwards with the birds – fly-whirling, whirl-flying, whirling into the multiple colours of light. Seeking …

There are a number of other things I could have said: How I think Greg is one of the finest landscape artists we have, a ‘national treasure’; how he paints water (and ground and sky) like few people I know of; how he both draws on, but also challenges conventional landscape art in radical and new ways; how he exemplifies a ‘radical pastoralism’ (as Australian aboriginal poet John Kinshella proposes) and an approach that echoes Emily Apter’s ‘aesthetics of critical habitats’ in a time of growing ecological crisis; of how his work can be seen as allegorical; or how his art is inserted into the complex histories of land, nature, and colonial dispossession in the Eastern Cape. But these have all been said before.

Rather, I want to emphasize this: that Greg offers us a real contemporary engaged space for re-engaging how Emmanuel Kant defined aesthetics – ‘the science which treats of the conditions of sensuous perception’. Relatedly Carol Armstrong has said: “We have, of late, come to assume the degraded, evacuated meaning of ‘aesthetic’, to the further point that it, like ‘beauty,’ is understood as the frivolous sign of bad conscience – of the corrupt, effeminate, and backward-looking elitism of commodity culture, the opiate not only of the effete, but of capitalism itself and its reified emptiness. … but … what if we again decided to take seriously the matter of ‘sensuous’ apprehension, as a defining preoccupation of human being, of consciousness itself? … That affection toward, attraction to, and immersion in the bodily [and natural] world we inhabit constituted a more serious attitude than the combination that presently rules of ambition, negation, and the oedipal one-upmanship of the avant-garde model of patrilineal descent? That [this] mode of …awareness is of more consequence than stadium-sized games of artistic competition.” This is what Greg offers us, and how he challenges us: to think and constantly re-think nature and the natural, and our relationships to it, and within and between its different spaces – water, air, light, fire, flight - as significant parts of necessary sensuous perception and apprehension, in order to begin to answer what colours the sacred might be. It’s a fantastic journey to go in and be in and the world is a better place – a much better place - for it.

And one final trace: for those of us who have ever tied a … fly to a trace and arced a floating line into a flowing corner of the Kwelera, the glimpse of movement angling away from us, it is impossible to not feel the twitch, the memory trace of anticipation in the fingers, when standing in front of the evening light of ‘Transfer’.

Professor Gary Minkley SARCHI Chair in Social Change, UFH