Tell it slant: Kasia Stefańczyk and Johno Mellish at THK

A review by Ben Albertyn on the 2nd of June 2023. This should take you 5 minutes to read.

THK
11.05 - 10.06.2023

I like the direction Kasia Stefańczyk took for her new show OKNO at THK Gallery. That is, the exhibition is mostly slanted. “Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” goes the stock Emily Dickinson line and I stand by it. I am sure Stefańczyk and Johno Mellish (whose wild natural setting takes up one third of the exhibition space) stand by a similar principle as well. Both artists capture the world truthfully, but slightly askew. I mean this perhaps more literally in Stefańczyk’s case and more figuratively in Mellish’s, but all the same, the pair seem to embrace the precariousness of a slanted world.

I thought I’d rather foreground slantedness as the central idiom of this artist pairing, instead of the more obvious aesthetic common ground like chiaroscuro or greyscale. Which is not to say that the latter qualities are unimportant. In fact, they determine the very direction in which these works are angled. Compare, for example, Mellish’s photographs here with the work he recently showed at The Fourth. Both series form part of the artist’s ongoing exploration of high weirdness, but the pictures shown at The Fourth were melodramatically coloured and excessive. I prefer them to the more gloomy black-and-white photographs of wild natural setting, partly just because they are so much fuller.

Johno Mellish, Snake on Table, 2022. Courtesy of THK.

With wild natural setting, Mellish is trying to unearth a very different kind of uncanny. He nods to Man Ray and Hans Bellmer in the show notes, which already gives you a sense of how to look at his pictures. There is something of the stiltedness of early surrealism in these shots, which helps slant the reality of the Garden Route he has documented here. Even in its weaker moments, the show is able to get at the unique weirdness of the South Coast in a way that I have never seen before. Snake on Table, for instance, nails the particular surreality of a SANParks bureau. I have visited many of these dusty old rondavels and never not been concerned that something dark might be lurking beneath their rustic charm. Mellish, never one to fuck around, puts a gigantic python front and centre on the office table.

Whether in subtle or more pronounced ways, the artist renders the natural world slantwise. I have always felt that there is something occulty about South African naturalism and wild natural setting humoured that intuition for a moment. Even so, the landscape depicted here is also very familiar to me (and the artist for that matter), which is likely why I found the images unsettling. My response suggests that we are in the domain of the unheimlich, that mysterious feeling upon which all of surrealism pivots. I dare not get too far into the weeds of this overused and ambivalent concept, but what is worth preserving about the unheimlich is the idea that what is most unsettling to us is the familiar made strange. When the call is coming from inside the house, etc. The most effective surrealism is therefore not the most outlandish, but that which burrows into normality to find the strange contradictions within.

Heimlich is cognate with home-like, which helps align the feeling of the unheimlich with moments when the home comes to seem unfamiliar. At dusk, when the dim light falls at a particular angle and shadows start to deepen, one’s living room can become uncannily still. So we rush to turn on a downlight and the feeling (mostly) recedes. Stefańczyk, however, makes a study out of these moments of stillness. She describes her work as “records of light, as it falls through an architecture, onto a surface, on a given day, at a specific time.” Each angular shape thus represents a distinct atmosphere, a particular moment in Stefańczyk’s studio captured on canvas or linen.

Installation view: Kasia Stefańczyk, OKNO, 2023. Courtesy of THK.

The blade-like shards that constitute these paintings give the impression of AbEx spontaneity, when in fact they are all carefully indexed and dated. There is an almost scholarly rigour to this presentation. The sheets of paint and staggered pencil lines catalogue the dailiness of life, but also manage to transcend mere documentary. Her subject is a strange urban marvel, as natural as it is architectural, and when these moments of shadowplay get layered and composed as thoughtfully as Stefańczyk does here, they take on an almost abstract quality. These portraits of soft, elongated light can, in the blink of an eye, come to seem dangerously sharp and threatening.

Kasia Stefańczyk, Light Painting 26 March 2023, 10:21am – 12:07pm, 2023. Courtesy of THK.

OKNO is held together by a simple, unifying idea, which makes the small deviations along its course all the more interesting. Like the corner of canvas cut out of the painting from 26 March 2023, revealing the wooden frame beneath. Or the bottom half of the diptych completed on the 24th that is angled outward, casting a diagonal shadow of its own. The occasional use of a slick ink black paint amongst the predominance of grey and white also grabbed me. These moments, however minor, skew the assumed course of the exhibition, but only just. Stefańczyk’s work tells the truth – it is literally transcribing sunlight – but it does so obliquely.

Slanted is neither skew nor straight; it hovers in between. Mellish documents the halflight between the familiar and the foreign, while Stefańczyk’s work is somehow at once representational and abstract. Neither choose to announce this as some kind of trans-disciplinary gesture. Instead, they invoke a slightly dissociated feeling. I think it is very healthy to be put in this position, of not quite knowing what you are looking at, every now and then. Not to flee from contradiction, but to remain suspended, for a moment, within it.