The Heart of the Matter

The Heart of the Matter, an exhibition by Ricky Burnett, Anton Karstel, and Iaan Waldeck.

05.06.2019- 19.07.2019

The Heart of the Matter nudges and provokes the viewer to consider these themes through the artists’ distinctive approach to materials.

The Heart of the Matter, an exhibition by Ricky Burnett, Anton Karstel, and Iaan Waldeck.

The exhibition, curated by the artists themselves, was born from a shared interest in the themes of memory, temporality, the relationship between image and reality, immateriality and materiality, and the role of the sacred. The Heart of the Matter nudges and provokes the viewer to consider these themes through the artists’ distinctive approach to materials.  

A selection of works from Ricky Burnett’s much lauded Troubled with Goya series places his work in poetic discourse with the work of Francisco Goya, executed in impasto so rich it almost activates a transition into the realm of sculpture. They are at once a shadowed passion and a seductive sensuality, with a carefully and nuanced insight into the subtler aspects of painting, the inherent content of physicality and the lexicon of expression. A thought-provoking observance of the tension between presence and absence. As Keats once said, “Heard melodies are sweet but those unheard are sweeter”. ­

In 1995 Anton Karstel buried a cement cast of himself in front of the Pretoria Art Museum. Twenty-four years later the cement double lies unaltered, fixed in time, while the artist’s body has been in motion, a passage en route to an inert state which will match the calcified matter in the cement. The pathos of this work is belied by Karstel’s gallows humour, which irreverently mocks the sacrosanct human sentiment about existence and oblivion. Karstel shows thirty-five black and white photographs of his self-burial, documented by Abrie Fourie.

The funereal content in Self-burial is echoed in Karstel’s paintings. On show are paintings from 1995 and 2017 which delve into South Africa’s violent history. A collection of photographic documents, transcribed into oil on canvas, doubles of the source material. The art/reality dyads involve a third element, the viewer, who’s forced to reconcile the seduction of oil paint with the repulsion which the subjects provoke.

Iaan Waldeck’s sculpture Ecce Homo is both a reduction and a composite summation of the human body and how one experiences being human. The sculpture, consisting of the exact elements and compounds of an 80kg man, raises complex questions about our existence. It begs the question; How and what are we, that we are made of this?

Included are works from Waldeck’s much publicized series A Casa dos Carvalhos; 10 Years of Democracy. The subject being the attack and murder of an elderly couple in their Johannesburg home, and the ensuing vandalism of their property over many years. Waldeck compounds the traumatic experience in tensely inter-meshed layers of object mementos and image traces, pointing at the violations and suffering that we often endure in South Africa.

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