I dropped past the new show at the AVA last night, relieved there was something new to see. It's been a little quiet lately, and the only thing left to comfort me has been an expanding New Year's hangover.

First up was Barbara Wildenboer, who has an absolutely extraordinary name and probably a huge fine for picking wild flowers. The main works consisted of photographed wild flowers printed on canvas, with the actual flower pinned to the image. A relatively moving rumination on the impermanence of nature, the inevitability of death, and the cruel humour of art recording beauty which is fleeting. This was marred unfortunately by the canvas, the printing of which is a bit too Kalk Bay for my taste, along with sandblasted vignettes on the glass, both of which added little, and subtracted from the raw power of the work.

In the main hall was an exhibition of drawings, which is a rare occurrence, called Tell Yr Daddy I Say Hello by Colin Strydom. There was quite nice drawing, vibrant mixed media stuff, but it suffered a little from illegibility, specifically the artist's intentions relayed by the press release didn't really communicate. But often when a press release mentions the dread word identity, their is a huge gap between the viewer's reading and the artist's writing. For example the only place I saw references to Afrikaner folk lore was in the titles.

Upstairs there were some paintings by Ndikhumbule Ngqinambi. Which surprised me, because I found the imagery to be quite nice, very dark and haunting rural scenes of people washing clothing in blood and such. His quote: "I find myself looking back on my footsteps. I still feel the faint sounds of those songs they sang then, and so I went back there, not so long ago to the forgotten land. As I stand looking at the valleys, I feel the smell of the plants and the moist red soil. I was not alone, though there was no one. Shadows running faster then the speed of time, you feel their existence but you cannot see them."
I can be a sucker for poetic things when I'm feeling soft. I like the creepiness. On the other hand, the handling of the paint was atrocious. Impasto is dead. It makes work less emotive, says more about paint than emotion, and obscures what seemed some really fine images.

Labels: barbara wildenboer, colin strydom, Ndikhumbule Ngqinambi