“Cape Town has a lot of galleries, but they only really have Michael Stevenson, who is truly professional, with an international status.” -Linda Givon

I mean really.

Do I have to go to Cape Town's only professional gallery and look at rainbows? My first girlfriend had a poster like this above her bed when I was 15, and it was naff back then even. Can we please take a step away from representing spirituality so literally. Next thing you know we going to be quoting American Indian proverbs.
If you want to know anything about the sacred yang and kung fu, watch a Zhang Yimou film, rather than look at a Tracy Payne painting. Now that's what I'm talking about. At least the colours are sumptuous.

Do we need to take this stuff seriously? I think not.

On the other side, in the little gallery (and a surprising choice to accompany Tracy Payne), was the obsessive Fabian Saptouw's Unravelled and Rewoven Canvas. Saptouw showed this piece before at his graduation from Michaelis, but seeing it again in a proper gallery space vastly increased my appreciation. Essentially, he unravelled a piece of blank canvas, and then rewove it by hand, using the threads in exactly the same order. Needless to say, a very labour intensive process.

I think there is a lot to be said for this work, it plays (or should I say works) on a variety of levels: a criticism of the importance of painting in visual culture (and a physical deconstruction of that); a look at the futility of craft in a mechanical era, but nevertheless showing a sense of enjoyment in the process; relearning lost skills; obsessiveness as a spiritual exercise; etc.

I was having an argument later in the Spur later with Eddie Yang and Andrew Limprecht. Ed seemed to think that the rewoven canvas was an uneccesary part, that the strings of thread were enough. Andrew said that the grey walls emphasised the strings over the rewoven canvas, where it should have been the other way around. The strings did seem out of place, a sign that the work was unfinished, perhaps.

My personal argument on the matter was that the process needn't have been shown at all, that in truth the process was implied by the title. My thoughts would be to ditch all the strings, equipment, graphs and videos, restretch the canvas, and just show that. Sometimes it seems that the labour should be explicitly shown, but I think that leaving it to speak from a finished piece is a more powerful work for its subtlety.

Still, for a first solo I was awed, and I can't wait to see some of the problems resolved later. It's worthwhile to see. Just run through the first rooms.

Labels: Fabian Saptouw, Michael Stevenson, Tracy Payne