A WEEK after seeing local landscape painter Greg Schultz’s exhibition Traces, now up at the Ann Bryant in East London, I still can’t get it out of my head. And to be totally honest, my reaction was a surprise even to me. Okay, so we all know Schultz is pretty damn good, but for a while I had privately wondered whether he would hit a plateau, forsake innovation and go the commercial route. It’s quite understandable when one has a wife and kids to feed and one has to hock one’s entire home to stage an exhibition.

But for such cynical thoughts I now unreservedly apologise. In fact, let me say this, with his 12 huge new canvases and his latest animation, Schultz has made what I believe is his greatest leap forward.

Traces is a marriage of mature technique and concept. It succeeds in doing what great art should: it transcends space and time and engages the viewer in an ingenious game of the senses.

What am I going on about? Art is as much about ideas as it is about tangible end product. Those who are deservedly in the history books haven’t just painted beautiful or controversial images – they have leapt off their canvases and hooked us into an experience.

And with Traces Schultz has done that – not just once but again and again.

Perhaps the most startling example is the almost surreal Seek. The unusual angle at which light enters the canvas leaves you scrambling to locate yourself. Are you beneath or above? Alongside or inside? Are you flying or swimming? Are you seeing fish, birds, islands or clouds?

The same thing happens with several other works including Constellation: Southern Cross and the waterscape, Sense, which could be a homage to Monet but suddenly, as University of Fort Hare Professor Gary Minkley suggests, you find yourself wondering whether you are underwater riding up to the surface on the back of a whale.

Part of the impact of course, comes from the sheer scale. At 2,5m x 1,6m the canvases are so large they have to be transported on the back of a flatbed truck.

One’s senses are also captured by vast expanses of colour so intense they pulsate.

But I would suggest a third reason for Schultz’s massive breakthrough. Although he continues to paint in his distinctive landscape genre and retains “his own explicit traces back to his mooring posts”, he has embarked on a reductive process. He has taken all his years of experience and refined and ground his art down to its sheer guts. While his foundations run deep, the clutter has gone. The focus has been sharpened to needlepoint and we are confronted with pure elements. Abstraction beckons and the impact is one of raw power.

As Minkley says, Traces “forces us to think and constantly rethink nature and the natural, and our relationship to it”.

My final words? Having seen the premier offerings at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, I’d say, heck, the best work in the province right now is up at the Ann Bryant Art Gallery until July 7.

Dawn Barkhuizen - Daily Dispatch July 2010