It’s hard to imagine the SA art world without people such as Teresa Lizamore. Gallerist and curator, dealer and mentor, Lizamore has brought hundreds of artists to the attention of aficionados and the public. A key figure in the development of SA’s corporate art collections, she has also run initiatives such as the SA Taxi Foundation Art Award and prominent annual exhibitions at Woordfees in Stellenbosch.
In 2001 she launched Artspace, which later became Lizamore & Associates — a gallery that has occupied numerous premises across Johannesburg. Over the years, I have covered Lizamore exhibitions on the Jan Smuts Avenue art strip in Parkwood, at her home in Fairlands, and at satellite venues such as the Fire Station in Rosebank. In June, she started a fresh chapter with Lizamore on Keyes, extending Rosebank’s Keyes Art Mile a little further north.
It took me longer than it should have to visit this new space, and my excitement at finally making my way there was matched by the eye-catching red and yellow sculptures at the gallery’s entrance. But the exhibition I was there to see, Dusk, operates in a different mode — or, perhaps I should say, introduces a different mood.
The exhibition statement beautifully describes that stage of the day when, “as light begins to slip away, colour changes”: “Bright hues dull, edges blur and the world takes on a quieter palette. The tones of dusk are muted and softened, sometimes almost monochromatic. This shift in atmosphere holds its own kind of clarity.”
Indeed, the works exhibited attest not only to artists seeing the world precisely but also to the precision of their execution of that vision. The prominent medium here is charcoal, which, with blues and greys in pastel and acrylic ink, invokes the encroaching darkness of twilight.
Mariè Stander and Dylan Graham render their portrait subjects in poignant poses and with wistful expressions. Ruan Huisamen employs a photorealist style that is astonishingly fine. Michael Graham Smith and Henk Serfontein use chiaroscuro to great effect, lending wrinkled feet and crumpled paper a ghostly or even cinematic feeling. Karin Preller’s floral fragments and the partial figure in Rienie have the hazier quality of memory, like blurred or faded black-and-white snapshots.
In contrast to these monochrome charcoals, Krisjan Rossouw and Justin Ringwall’s photographic works are bursting with the colours of skin tones, flowers and fabrics, complemented in Ringwall’s mixed media pieces with texture and embroidery. There is also the playful colouration of Kevin Collins’ stoneware.
Collins fuses pottery and portraiture to create quirky characters and situations, responding to the exhibition’s title with gentle parody in Sunset Cruise, A Shirt for Sunset and Evening Star. A more earnest, lyrical tone is struck in the staccato Afrikaans poetry of The Source of Twilight: “Skemer val. Die dag is verby.”
It is a lyricism matching the eloquent exhibition concept note, which aptly describes that early evening time “when movement slows and attention shifts inward”.
“The body unwinds, the air cools and the noise of the day softens”, allowing us to become “more aware of stillness, of what lingers and of what the day has left behind”.
In such a moment, the world of business and politics, of conflict and ambition, is kept at arm’s length. Yet Diek Grobler and Stephen Rosin insist that we don’t forget about it entirely, drawing our attention to the greedy and power-hungry who dominate their fellow citizens. Collectively we remain beholden to, and constantly threatened by, those who sit “at the conquerors’ table” or play the “never-ending game of cat and mouse” (to borrow from the titles of works by Grobler and Rosin).
To have made it to the end of another day among the prowling tigers and lions that loom menacingly large in Rosin’s imagery is no small feat — hence, dusk brings “a sense of relief or resilience”, of “having made it through, once again”. And what of nightfall and the day beyond? Hope, Lizamore and her artists suggest, “is not loud” but “lives in small gestures, in breath, in repetition”, in the evening rituals that help us carry “the weight of what remains”.
• Dusk is at Lizamore on Keyes, 29 Keyes Avenue, Rosebank, until September 30.
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