Dorothee Kreutzveldt at João Ferreira
By Bettina Malcomess
For studio visits, Mark Rothko would pre-select paintings that he considered 'fit' in with a collector's taste. On one occasion he had chosen what is described as a dark and brooding painting for a collector. It had made her sad and she'd asked for a happier painting, something in reds and oranges, maybe a little yellow. After a long pause Rothko had replied, 'Aren't those the colours of an inferno?'
There is something difficult about Dorothee Kreutzfeldt's latest solo show at João Ferreira, entitled 'the virgins are all trimming their wicks'. Reactions have been mixed. A younger art crowd has found it hard to get into the paintings, while those more familiar with previous work are unsure. The show is framed by a no less elliptical text, itself reflective of a sense of dislocation. The work emerges from the artist's travels between Johannesburg and Kinshasa, out of the apocalyptic imaginary of the media, the lyrics of a Johnny Cash song based on Revelations, and the artist's own insomnia. While this dislocation is taken to be both a postmodern and postcolonial given, perhaps what makes the show one of Kreutzfeldt's most difficult is that the paintings, and the show as a whole, refuse resolution. The paintings themselves seem to want more.
The show is designed to shift. From week to week the paintings rotate, some are completely removed to be replaced by new ones, while white spaces and blanks are introduced. The artist plans to leave only one painting for the final week. This shifting constellation of an 'insomniac's diary' is echoed by the paintings themselves: figures become lines, lines bleed into surfaces with traces of other versions of the same paintings still visible behind the paint. Text and direct tracings of popular icons in ink are applied over the painted surface. At times the painting marks resemble drawing, a preliminary process, threatened with erasure. In all, we are left with little to hold onto.
Kreutzveldt has always played these urban surfaces off each other to create the space of her paintings, her imagery very much located in its context: Johannesburg and now Kinshasa. If the show continues this play, it does so a little bit more cautiously, a little less lightly. Sources of imagery range from sport and signwriting (two longtime pre-occupations) to wildlife magazines and indigenous plants, but also Medieval paintings of heaven and hell. The artist herself admits to being as much influenced by Ed Ruscha as Heironymus Bosch. Paintings like, Thank god i'm a black man, detail the pattern on the spoilers of a drag-racing car, echoing the artist's interest in signage.
However, in a spectacular day, a gymnast is impaled on a pole; in I died a thousand times a lion and a tiger seem to be vomiting up an obsessively scribbled crayon blue. As such, the painting's palette of reds, yellows and purples shifts ambiguously between the light and playful and the difficult, even disturbing. The portrait of Congolese president Joseph Kabila, titled A good looking black man, commissioned from a signwriter, was initially coupled with the A good looking koppie. In both, a housepaint yellow predominates. In the circular portrait it forms a spotlight, a halo, even echoing the circular framing of a Medieval panel. For the koppie, it is the colour of highveld grass, but also yellow road markings, the Rastafarian and ANC flags, J&B billboards, and with a simple red band at the top of the painting: fire. For Rothko, these are the colours of hell. The 'virgins', however, accommodate both the associations of the potential collector and Rothko, in fact they are constantly playing off each other so that it is difficult to hold onto a single response. Imagery shifts, entire paintings are lost.
Furthermore, the artist herself seems to have removed any sense of her own handmark. Images were traced using an overhead projector, others done by signwriters. Unlike earlier exhibitions such as 'Tigers Don't Cry', this is not contrasted with more expressionistic brushmarks. While the visual language is so much her own, Kreutzfeldt herself seems to be somewhat removed from the conversation, making the paintings even harder 'to get into'. This should be placed in context of her work as a whole, which has become increasingly interested in painting conceptually, often combining this with installation and even architectural structure. She recently worked with two long-distance runners for a performance at the Parking Gallery in Johannesburg. Kreutzfeldt's work has always been marked by a visual intelligence and sensibility for the images and iconography that surround her. Her paintings speak in a language and from a context that is both not, and her own. This show finds her work at an interesting point. It is a show somewhere between two places.
Opens: March 7
Closes: March 28
João Ferreira
70 Loop Street, Cape Town
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