There are four things I love most about Hyde Park Corner in Johannesburg: the movie theatre with its black pleather deck chairs and ‘buglets’ that arrive on a white platter, the philosophy section of Exclusive Books, the cake table in the adjacent restaurant with its tree-top view, and Graham Contemporary, an art dealership with foot-traffic undreamed of by most galleries. This is unsurprising, given its location in a bespoke mall, whose wealthy patrons wish for nothing more than to splurge in an economic crisis, or as a wise friend informed me, would like us to think so, while pointing to a portly man with a big bald head, a clutch, and turquoise linen suit cut just above the knee.  

Then again, it is spring in Johannesburg, and turquoise linen can’t be faulted. Entering Graham Contemporary – not for the first time – I am once again startled by the look and feel of the show, which runs for two months. Titled ‘New Day’, it is anticipatory, warm, life affirming, the walls aglow with bright art, the floors strewn with purple blossoms – unsurprising given the time of year, the best in Johannesburg, when a bling city is further bedazzled by millions of Jacaranda blossoms.

Gauche? For the snobs, certainly. Yet there, in one of the most astonishing shows I’ve seen in decades, anywhere in the world, there is undoubtedly something fresh. Tracy Payne’s watercolour lozenges suggest illumined cups of strained tea, less about colour, more about light, as affectless as they are sublime. This is anything but noisy art. One senses the artist’s utter disinvestment in need. At once glacial and fathomless, one bows before, or sups from these exquisite, quiet paintings. What they profoundly tell us is that stillness, or some tremulous variant thereof, is essential if we are to survive bombast.

Tracy Payne, Solar Bi-Pods, 2020. Courtesy of Grahams Gallery.

Further abstract paintings unfold. They vary staggeringly, reminding us that a so-called genre – abstraction – is protean. Kristin Ng-Yang’s pastel colour blocking and aleatory lines speak to solace, some effervescent solidity. I am speaking in paradox, I know, but, somehow, I cannot wholly reconcile or contain the ingenuity of Ng-Yang’s languorous solid forms or Payne’s sublimely gleaming thin soups. Though markedly different, each speaks to a greater consolatory gentleness. This mood, or temperament – knowing that it is tricky to fix artists thus – prevails, most strikingly in Katherine Spindler’s interiors that seemed to have been caught in some numinous dusk, in Carolyn Parton’s ‘de-paintings’ which, while appearing to be doing-painting less, seem, oddly, extractive, because it is the little – Samuel Beckett’s ‘lessness’ – that is brought to the fore. 

Margot Muir and Jan-Henri Booyens’ studies in blue are both generative, Muir’s inspired by solar – light battery-packed, reemitted when darkness falls – Booyens’ by a brain abuzz. In Muir’s case we are dealing with night photographs of rain, a substance as physical as it is ephemeral. Yves Kline’s blue comes to mind, but there, in those photographs, it is not a colour but a state of mind that matters: how one lives in the rain, in the night. The sensate qualities living beings require to endure, to survive our ideals, remain exquisitely and vulnerably mortal. This is the primary condition for why Muir and Booyens make their art. Booyens’ vast canvases appear ‘decorative’ to those who fail to grasp the bare-forked humanity that impels them, perhaps because Booyens stakes no claim, because he courageously operates without any need for witness. 

Jan-Henri Booyens, Architects of Desaster (sic), n.d. Courtesy of Grahams Gallery.

The mood and timbre shifts as we move about ‘New Day’, a show that comes without a manifesto. After all, aren’t we all constantly being hailed? The infamous American conscription poster is typical in this regard – WE WANT YOU – which is the business of ideologues. Here, however, in this astonishingly expressive and emotive show, a very different set of coordinates emerge – ones that allow each and every viewer to be, or better, to become themselves. 

Tanya Bonello’s mystical paintings in gypsum and oil on board moodily echo Payne’s magically lit watercolours. One enters Bonello’s paintings as though one has stumbled into a tomb in which night slowly and subtly reveals an inner light made of gold and blue. These works are secretive, enigmatic, intrinsically spiritual. Their alignment with Cinga Samson’s sepulchral still-life and Coral Bijoux’s darkly wooden anthropomorphic chairs is fitting. Here we have entered a night-world. Bijoux’s chairs are especially compelling, because they are phatic, conspiratorial, strikingly vaginal. However, while gender has its critical role to play, Bijoux’s engagement remains amorphous and surreal.

Gaelen Pinnock, Filament #4, 2022. Courtesy of Grahams Gallery.

The adventure continues. No single world overrides another. In a series of astonishing gridded works by Alexander Opper, Gaelen Pinnock, and Yedidya Falkson, a very different complex is underway, one in which binarity quivers. Falkson’s Ndebele inspired grid is weighty, if small, the whole an assemblage of dissonant parts coloured a Mediterranean blue. Pinnock’s grid, whether crisply sheer or deconstructed, alerts us to the void without which no form can ever exist. His seemingly melted grids, in particular, alert us to the larval fluidity of these times. As for Opper? His choreography of a green soap in a yellow dish in a yellow bathroom, filled with slime green water, is hilarious – the wittiest work on show. Shot during lockdown, it is literally tongue in cheek. It gives us what we most need – to laugh in the midst of austerity, abstract the everyday, and find wonder therein. Banality too is a state of grace.

Two very different works deserve our attention. These are the sculptures by the younger, Kobus le Grange, and elder, Norman Catherine. Le Grange’s assembled figures in raw pale bits of wood are quiet, while Catherine’s massive hybrids in oil on fibreglass are noisome and deliberately unsettling. Crossing the spectrum from the organic to inorganic, the real and the simulacral, these very different sculptors remind us that today, now, these easy divides are no longer applicable. Everything shivers, dilates, quakes, tears. But, at the same time, everything also blossoms. If Le Grange’s sculptures possess a sedentary ease, are consolatory despite their constructivist fracture, then Catherine’s mammoth creatures and his ‘Ju-Ju Bazaar’ arrive at an eerie screech, present for decades, which insists in popping any quiescent bubble. The ‘New Day’, after all, is no hallmark card. But what these artists give us is a future that possesses an ethical complexity and wealth of being. What’s not to love?                       

Norman Catherine, Ju Ju Bazaar, 1996. Courtesy of Grahams Gallery.