WHEN police opened fire on protesters outside the post office in Sharpeville in 1960, Trevor Coleman knew the situation had become untenable and, like many of his peers, set off for London.
This was a fortuitous move for he returned six years later with something never seen before in South African art; hard edge painting.
Before his self-imposed exile to London, as the 1950s became the 1960s SA lagged behind global trends of the avant-garde in Europe and America. Coleman’s only experience of abstraction was through tiny reproductions in books that could never compete with the visceral experience of standing in front of such modern masterpieces.
Hard edge painting is in many ways a logical conclusion to the investigations into abstraction started by Jackson Pollock and the abstract expressionists. Yet there is something markedly different here; control and precision. While the abstract expressionists brought all the chaos of raw human emotion to the canvass, hard edge painters sought a different direction that could stimulate the senses and create new vocabularies of visual communication.
In London, Coleman’s career took off. Throwing away his South African passport he was free to chart his own artistic trajectory, unhindered by a society resistant to the new. As his career blossomed, a chance encounter led him to the studio of a young David Hockney where, as he recalls, they discussed the birth of British pop art and he heard the Beatles’ I Want to Hold Your Hand. He attended the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank where he heard the violinist Yehudi Menuhin. London was at the centre of the world.
At this stage Coleman was still painting in the dull palette synonymous with South African art of the period. Working in mixed media his paintings were evocative of earthy crusts and scorched landscapes. As he described to me in a interview "I took Africa to England … and they soaked it up".
It was then with understandable hesitance that Coleman, for family obligations, had to return to SA in 1966. Passing Lorenzo Marques |(now Maputo) on the Union Castle Line he recalls a sickening feeling of having to start back again at zero. But zero wasn’t quite what Coleman had up his sleeve. His time in London had led him to discover a style of geometric abstraction that was totally different to anything ever seen in this country.
In 1967 he was the first South African to show at the Goodman Gallery, which had just been opened by Linda Goodman, also fresh back from London. As the years went by and Coleman persisted with investigations into hard edge painting, his work took on a uniquely local flavour, drawing on inspiration from Ndebele wall paintings. The critics were hostile and unreceptive to a style of painting that challenged the orthodoxy of representation.
As Coleman continued to probe the limits of abstraction with his shaped canvasses dictating the pictorial arrangements of his surfaces he captured the outcomes of this experience into words. It is then perhaps fitting to end with his own thoughts from 1969 when writing in artlook he remarked: "I want to try and speak about the beauty of form. By this I do not mean … the forms of living creatures or their representations in paintings, but straight lines and curves, and the surfaces and solids produced from them by a lathe or a ruler and set square. These are not beautiful for any particular reason or purpose, as other things are, but by their very nature they are always beautiful, and by their very existence they give their own kind of pleasure which is quite free from the itch of desire, and there are colours too with this characteristic which are beautiful and impart the same kind of pleasure."
• An exhibition of Coleman’s work from the 1960s to the 1980s runs at the Stellenbosch Modern and Contemporary Art Gallery until August 23.
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