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Georgina Gratrix, Untitled, 2008,
monotype with Intaglio ink and oil paint
on 250g Zerkall litho paper, 77.6 x 55.5cm |
Patti Smith builds her epic 1975 track ‘Land’ to a culmination with a recurrence of the word “possibilities”. Smith’s lyrical style here, one of free association, with one sound and idea building on and expanding the previous, is perhaps a useful metaphor for colour’s function in visual art at this juncture in South Africa’s history. The suggestibility of colour, and particularly coloured paint, lends art a value beyond empirical reportage. The chief intellectual barbarism of apartheid was to shut down possibility, rendering various forms of image making (and thus image thinking) undesirable,ill-advised or even illegal. Yet during this period colour remained transgressive in its suggestion of conceptual and emotional complexity. Similarly, in the post-apartheid cultural context, blighted for the bulk of the post-liberation period by conservative delineations of identity, most often through photography, painting in colour seems to hold special possibilities for expression that sidesteps the predictable and the coagulating.
