Eris Silke is a gifted, but erratic, 'outsider' artist of Hungarian extraction and Israeli upbringing whose self-dramatising, narrative themes and meticulously detailed illustrative style both appear remote from contemporary artistic concerns. Her world is one of ghoulish Gothic fantasy that often casts a compulsive stranglehold over the viewer. The self-taught artist works predominantly in black and white, using a crisp-focus style reminiscent of Victorian illustration. A flawless miniaturist, Silke's skill in the trompe-l'oeil rendering of the figuring and grain of wood, and the texture of fabrics, fur and hair is breathtaking.

When Silke transcends her own narcissistic self-absorption, she is capable of producing poignant meditations on the traumas of Jewish history. Her portrait of her mother, a holocaust survivor and cancer sufferer, is certainly the most potent work on this show. Dressed to the hilt in sumptuous couture, this aged and ravaged lady is all bitter grit, pride and stoicism as she confronts the world with a wary, disenchanted stare. Sadly, such humanity and psychological depth are the exception, not the rule in 'Dreams and Obsessions', her recent show at Cape Town's AVA.

Icon, a diminutive self-portrait, reveals the thematic kernel of the artist's oeuvre. Silke applies a close-up format to her own face, and portrays herself as an idealised, eternally youthful fairy-tale princess with a dreamy, introspective gaze. The painting presents a vision of ethereal femininity, and Silke aggrandises this paragon by placing a halo behind her head and decking the image out with lace and floral tributes so that it becomes a high altar to herself. Such auto-glorification constitutes Silke's leitmotif, and her passionate and enduring love affair with herself must rank as one of South African art's most thoroughly documented liaisons.

Silke's overriding concern in both life and art is the propagation of her own personal myth. To enact this, she has devised an extremely studied persona that she inhabits in daily life, and commemorates in her painting. As her art and her person coincide, the critic must perforce ask who and what Eris Silke is.

The artist is an exotic ex-beauty queen who projects conflicting signals of erotic endowment and waif-like vulnerability. Despite her conversational gifts, one never feels one knows the real Eris for the flamboyantly theatrical eccentricities of her conduct and dress smack of artifice and role-playing.

Art too fails to reveal the real Eris for, what she records is a romanticised mental construct of herself not the reality. In Porcelain Doll, she becomes an exquisite Coppelia with huge, guileless blue eyes, parted mouth and tumbling blond tresses. The doll, an epitomé of innocent defencelessness, is the artist's chosen alter ego. In this guise Eris presents herself as the essence of beauty, frailty and purity, and her art iconises her as sacrificial victim, martyr and saint.

The paintings are boudoir masquerades in which Eris is perpetually sacrificed upon the altar of male lechery. Man is a defiler, slaking his vampiric thirst on the artists' bleeding neck in Lovers, and boorishly mounting her with his boots on in Making Love to the Dying. In Tribute to Sendak she metamorphasises this transgressor into a hairy, snouted, paedophilic rodent - all tooth, saliva and lustfully gleaming eyes - dandling a rosy-cheeked, pre-pubescent Eris on his knee. Even in the sanctum of her bedroom, Eris cannot escape violating intrusion. In Mr and Mrs, peeping toms and macabre beasts spy on her as she strips down to her suspender belt.

Pride, a portrait of one of the artist's old flames, portrays him as a hideously raddled and depraved Restoration rake. Sexuality is understood in black and white moral terms. Men are, of course, bastards, while the Eris look-alike is invariably apotheosised as the personification of virtue and wronged innocence. In the Sendak painting Eris rigs herself out as a chaste village madchen in folkloric peasant attire, while in Mother and Child she crowns herself with a rose-festooned mantilla that hallows her as a Mater Dolorosa.

Blatant inconsistencies undermine the credibility of this visual hagiography. Although Eris usually depicts herself as Snow White, she also appears as Lolita and Irma la Douce so that vamp and virgin blend into one split personality and double standards prevail. Abuse is feared yet skimpy attire intimates availability. The phallus is the Great Despoiler, yet Skin and Roses, a close-up of rose-girt genitalia, is an adoring hymn to the trinity of male private parts. Silke's painting expresses sexual ambivalence in which fear of violation alternates with erotic yearning, and innocence becomes a titillating come-hither.

The inspiration is clearly obsessional, and the problem with Silke's obsessions is that she cannot see through them or beyond them, and thus the auto-therapy implicit in her painting is without redemptive effect. There is no catharsis. Her art memorialises obsession; it does not exorcise it. Consequently the paintings are static and without capacity for growth and renewal.

Indeed at this exhibition gimmickry mars the impact of Silke's flawless miniaturist exactitude. Lurid mottled backgrounds of random shapes executed in screaming blue and tawdry gold and silver mar the delicate detail and colour of Tribute to Sendak and other paintings. Silke has always embedded tiny paste gemstones into her pigment, creating an opulent effect that enhances the precious appearance of her workmanship, but here glitz runs riot, and the canvases resemble an Ackermann's jewellery counter during a fire sale.

Techniques formerly deployed with subtlety, degenerate into gross mannerisms, and the glass eyes she plants on her faces create a jarring effect and deprive the physiognomies of meaningful expression. Finally the vulgar, ostentatious frames overwhelm the works. Painting the frame to integrate it with the painting often produces a sorry mess of streaks and smears. The artist appears to be so wrapped up in her own lurid and panting sexual fantasies that she has lost all critical faculty and allowed her work to lapse into shaming self-disclosure.

Closed: May 27

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