Detached: The use of colour in Mxolisi Dolla Sapeta’s paintings by Emma Taggart

This paper will look at the use of colour by Mxolisi Dolla Sapeta in work he completed for the solo exhibitions “Window-dress puppet master vs Institution chicken boy” (2005) and “Detached” (2007).

In these exhibitions Sapeta acts like a dowsing stick zoning in on dark emotions found in the underbelly of the city environment. He captures in his work the alienation and confusion often symptomatic of city life. Along with his lonely figures he also paints the corrupted, power hungry and destitute.

Sapeta’s uses solid colours as a backdrop to create the sense of alienation in his work. The background colours range from acid yellow to green grey and murky blue. They offer no protection to the figures in the foreground, emphasizing rather than diminishing the figure’s alienation in their environment. The flat colour backgrounds expose the foreground figures, pushing them forward and leaving them vulnerable with no illusion of depth to retreat into.

The colours also dominate the canvas. Sapeta often paints his figures off to one side, creating the sense that the background colour has pushed the foreground figures into the corners of the work further alienating them from the painting.

If there is any depth in Sapeta’s work, it is created by elements of the city’s architecture which looms large over the figures. Tall buildings or telephone wires (a common feature in Sapeta’s work) create some depth by receding towards a vanishing point, but they too hang in an empty no man’s land of colour.

Sapeta’s use of non-natural colour and flat backgrounds is reminiscent of the move towards Abstraction in the western tradition of painting, and no doubt Sapeta has been influenced by these artworks. However, unlike the utopian ideals underlining much Abstract art, Sapeta’a work is about dystopia. The metaphysical, emotional or spiritual depth explored in Abstract art is subverted in Sapeta’s work by the disjuncture between his destitute figures and the colour behind them. The strong colour of the background alienates the foreground figures; they are out of sync with the background and feel superimposed. The background colour offers no insight into the emotions of the individual but rather clouds interpretation. It is the contrast between the strong unified colour in the background and the small alienated figures in the foreground that emphasises the lack (of substance, willpower, character etc) of the foreground figures. The solid colour is what makes them appear so desperate in their environment.

This paper will explore the relationship between colour and alienation in Sapeta’s work further making reference to use of colour in Abstract painting, and relating Sapeta’s work to other contemporary artists who use abstract colour in a way that is a subversion rather than imitation of Abstract painting from the Modern tradition of painting.

TERRA: Mining the Artist’s Paintbox from the African Industrial Landscape by Jeannette Unite

Ten years ago I started spending time on mines. My shock response to the 40-year old diamond prospecting pits on the paleaolithic African West Coast beach deposits resulted in the first body of work I exhibited as “Earthscars: A Visual Mining Exploration” in 2004. This show has travelled in different forms to site significant cities and galleries around the SADC countries. Mining has defined African cultural and socio-political identity and the impact of colonialism and globalization affects how we occupy our current landscape.

The work expanded from Earthscars to exploring rehabilitation plants and environmental relationships. Conversations around visual interpretation of the extractive industry with geologists, engineers, metallurgists, and industrialist’s have further expanded my understanding of mining. I have developed paint and pastel and glass recipes from the advice of earth scientists, geo-chemists, paint-chemists and a ceramicist to develop this ‘eco-alchemic’ work.

Over the past decade visual explorations include journeys to Namaqualand, Simon van der Stel’s copper mine, the first colonial mine from 1685, to harbours and construction sites and visits to active gold, coal, salt, manganese, titanium and platinum as well as obsolete and archaeological mine sites. I take photographs from these travels and duplicate images from mining museums and archives, the internet, mining journals and libraries. But the most significant treasures I get from mines are the sands and detritus soiled with history.

My pallette is jars filled with metalliferous and diamondiferous mine dump sand, dust, overburden and metal oxides. My artworks incorporate industrial waste containing enough metal to yield startling colour when molten in kilns in extreme temperatures. The artist as end user of mining re-establishes the art and science link and reminds us that pre-industrial era artists used pestles and mortar in art production. The abstract chthonic glass panels are constructed from recycled detritus and sometime toxic material like lead, arsenic and cyanide that catalyse the mineral and metal reactions.

My material is both subject and object of this corpus of work. Abstract landscapes are made from the actual landscape in a ‘beauty-from-waste’ aesthetic.

I am currently investigating a way to transform current research into work around the issues of the Resource Curse, also known as the ‘paradox of plenty’.

Arguments of Light by Vaughn Sadie

In 1807, gas-lighting was first installed the streets of Europe, fundamentally shifting the conception and experience of urban environments. According to an article entitled “Arguments against Light” published in the Cologne Zeitung in 1816, this new street lighting was objectionable on a number of theological, judicial, medical, moral and socio-economic standpoints. From a contemporary standpoint, it is difficult to imagine lightless cities, let alone a delegation of those against it. The fear was that lighting the city would lead to illness, depravity, economic loss and would tamper with ‘the divine plan of the world’. Almost two hundred years later, artificial light not only permeates our public and private spaces, but shapes the ways in which we experience the world. So ever-present are these forms of lighting, that they have become banal and imperceptible. We tend not to notice them or the light and colour they emit. Until they go out.

This paper will explore the relationship between artificial light, colour and space, and how this contributes to the construction of our urban environments. For the purpose of this paper, I will be focusing on a series of examples of domestic and public uses of artificial light that draw on electricity (such as, compact fluorescents, tungsten light bulbs and mercury vapour street lamps). The discussion is therefore not focused necessarily on different colours, but on the intricacies of tone, arguing that meaning and significance has been attached to the design and tone of these lights, that fundamentally shape our experience of space. Artificial lights, and their tonalities, shape our understanding and experience of time and space, often more than we recognise.

Lefebvre, in his spatial triad, argues that space is produced by the relationship between ‘representations of space’, ‘representational space’ and ‘spatial practices’. These relationships are imbued with power (Massey) and it is in the light of this thinking, that I argue that artificial light is both a manifestation of dominant ideologies and a mechanism of social control.

In order to illustrate this argument, I will be using examples of the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Dan Flavin, in relationship to my own work.

Re-imagining the Self through Colour: the Politics of Pink in the Art of Lawrence Lemaoana by Mary Corrigall

With its ability to seduce and lure spectators, it was French theorist Charles Blanc who in the 19th century unequivocally declared that colour in and of itself represented the feminine sex – monochromatic drawings were viewed as masculine.

Nevertheless specific hues or colour groupings have also been subject to gendered classifications, albeit that these have not remained fixed over time. In 1809 German Romantic painter and theorist Philipp Otto Runge concocted a colour circle of ideal and real values in which a range of warm tones from yellows to orange were pegged as distinctly masculine and while at the other end of the spectrum the cool blues to the violets were deemed as essentially feminine. When the neo-romantic expressionists began to work with the same colour chart almost a century later, these associations were reversed. Despite these radical shifts in values the semiotics of colour have intrinsically invoked a discourse on gender. So while deconstructivist theorists such as Stephen Melville have suggested that colour is “bottomlessly resistant to nomination, attaching itself absolutely to its own specificity and the surfaces on which it has or finds visibility,” it has been subjected to cultural definitions.

South African artist Lawrence Lemaoana attempts to uncover and challenge gendered notions attached to the colour pink, nevertheless the power of his expression rests on exploiting the culturally inscribed values attached to this colour. Lemaoana projects this signifier of femininity onto masculine protagonists associated with what is deemed an essential masculine pursuit, rugby, thereby subverting the ‘rules of the game’. Lemaoana’s liberal use of pink in works such as the Last Line of Defence (2008) also summons a discourse on race. For while pink is associated with femininity this tone is also, and particularly within the canon of traditional western painting, connected to the colour of human skin - for obvious reasons these connotations are interrelated. In such a context it is Caucasian flesh tones that operate as the default signifier of skin. So while Lemaoana’s art manifests as photographs of pink-clad subjects it wrestles with the politics of western painting and its relationship polemics on race. Studies of colour have centred on painting largely because, as art historian John Gage observed, colour valorised the radical truth of painting.

The colour pink gives expression to Lemaoana’s art but he also employs it as a device to re-imagine or re-conceive of notions of the self, not only the masculine self but the black self. By completely enrobing his subjects in pink he shatters the archetypal masculine self while similarly advancing them as ‘ideal’, albeit synthesised, white-European protagonists. In this way while his subjects are liberated on one front they are similarly locked into another circumscribed identity on the other. This paper will explore this paradoxical position which Lemaoana articulates in relation to both gendered notions attached to the colour pink as well as the manner in which this colour has manifested in the canon of western painting.