Robert Hodgins at the Goodman Gallery Cape
by Sue Williamson
Robert Hodgins has every intention, he says, of being the first South African artist to get up on the morning of his 100th birthday, walk into his studio, and begin to paint.
And if the exhibition of recent paintings which has just been shown at Goodman Gallery Cape is any indication, the work which will emerge will be very well worth waiting for. The work of many artists in their later years, and here one might think of Abstract Expressionist painter Willem de Kooning, is considered to be lesser, revealing a falling off in power and energy from the major work made in the middle years. This is certainly not the case with Hodgins.
The advancing years have, if anything, empowered him to move on from what he refers to as 'good-mannered paintings' (not that he hasn't always made work which could cut like a knife when the urge came: one thinks here of great paintings like A Beast Slouches (1986) and Ubu - the official portrait (1981)), and to make work of enormous assurance and power.
On this most recent exhibition, (a sellout on opening day) the sensuous and brilliant colour which is the hallmark of Hodgins' work, is underpinned by a greater complexity in pictorial depth achieved with soft, cloud-edged layers that float over a solid background and are in turn pinned down by flat colour in the foremost plane of the painting, as in Men in Bunks 7.11 etc 2007/8 and Une Dame aux Fleurs 2007/8. Although Hodgins says that he tries not to theorise about his work, as thinking just trips him up, it might be said that this bypassing of the intellect, this reliance on his painter's eye and instinct is the source of the great freedom so successfully conveyed by his work.
In Seated figure, red chair the skinny, monkey-like figure that is the subject of the painting is not so much seated as entrapped by the chair which seems to have subsumed his body and flooded its blood colour over his legs. From above his head a light shines on him, recalling scenarios of interrogation and desperation. For Hodgins, 'That apartheid past is not in the past... for the artist, it is as near and as far as the present.'
At 88, he says, 'I need to be that schizoid character who isn't that nice person who smiles at openings. I need to be more layered...' Hodgins broke his hip in the last year, and admits that an edge of mortality came to him, 'but you can't stop painting just because you are ill'. The chair painting prefigures a new series around chairs Hodgins is planning.
Shallower in depth by the very nature of the process by which they are made - hand-printed rather than painted - Hodgins' monoprints are nonetheless masterly: playful and seductive in the manner of Japanese prints. Hodgins works with Mark Attwood of the Artists' Press in White River to produce these alluring prints, working on three images at the same time.
The pity of it is, by the nature of exhibitions and galleries, now that the exhibition has been taken down and the paintings and monoprints dispatched to their eager buyers, this particular group of Hodgins works will more than likely never again be seen together in a single space, glowing and resonating with each other as they did in the Goodman show, setting up their own discourse. And that will be a loss to us all.
Opens: November 8
Closes: November 29
Goodman Gallery Cape
3rd Floor Fairweather House, 176 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock
Tel: (021) 462 7573
Fax: (021) 462 7579
Email: info@goodmangallerycape.com
Hours: Tue - Fri 9.30am - 5.30pm, Sat 10am - 4pm
