Guns & Rain | SOLO, Investec Cape Town Art Fair
16.02 - 18.02.2024
I first viewed Adrian Fortuin’s work during a studio visit in December, while home from Basel where I have been studying. I had submitted my PhD thesis shortly before and was still in a bit of a dwaal – a dazed state – arriving at his Johannesburg home. My attention was first caught a few months before when a friend shared images of his work on Instagram and I had subsequently perused catalogues shared by his gallery, but it was only in person that my synapses fully snapped to attention and the fatigue of months of dogged academic writing fell away. His is the kind of work that provokes consideration. In the interstices between him talking to each of the fourteen paintings, then stacking them tightly against each other in the small space as he proceeded, I found myself thinking about my own interests in painting, as a scholar and as a writer. The paintings, individually and collectively, were on the cusp of completion, soon to be sent to the SOLO section of the 2024 edition of Investec Cape Town Art Fair. This showcase of new work by nine artists curated by Sean O’Toole places painting front and centre. It is an interesting and industrious assemblage, representative of their assembler. ‘Loopholes in the Walls of Darkness’ (based on a poem by Lesego Rampolokeng, and framing to O’Toole’s curatorial statement questions);
“Why painting, though? What is it about this antediluvian technology that grips the imagination? One possible answer involves painting’s demand for embodied encounters. A painting is not a jpeg; it is a felicitous confrontation with matter organised just so in physical space. Another, entirely different answer to the question why painting has to do with the medium’s adaptability and survivability. At risk of pointing out the obvious, artists are constantly reaffirming painting’s utility and durability as an eloquent medium of contemporary expression. Far from being a moribund throwback, painting is vibrant, urgent, and recuperative.”
Among my more progressive friends in the arts, there is a disdain for painting and sometimes I feel a bit embarrassed by my interest in it. A curator-friend recently lamented collectors’ greedy interest in painters compared to their disregard for, say, video artists, on the basis that “paintings are a risk-free investment.” It seems to me that painting is to visual art what economics is to the social sciences; a totalizing hegemony on what we value, how we come to decide on what is of value, and how we can and must push the limitations of both.
I’ll return to Fortuin in a minute, indulge me in a brief jaunt:
Kunstmuseum Basel will soon host the significant exhibition When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting‘ curated by Koyo Kouoh and Tandazani Dhlakama and first shown at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art in 2023. Alongside colleagues at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Basel, I have been consulting with the museum to support them in bringing the exhibition to Basel, where the museum audience is (unsurprisingly) very different to that of Zeitz in Cape Town. As someone without any training in art history, experiencing that exhibition in this way has been formative for my thinking about painting, figuration, and art history more generally. I am grateful to have delved into the exhibition’s treasure trove of aesthetic, political, and cultural lineages that have influenced the Black art history canon. It is against this background of grappling with the absence and distortion of Black presence within Western art history that I have been thinking with Fortuin’s body of work, titled A Blue Burn, a Slight Return and Other Ways to Fal l.
Fortuin turns thirty this year, and it’s tempting to twin him with democratic South Africa and get carried away waxing lyrical about the apparent historicity of narrative representations in his work. For example, Where are they going (2024), is inspired by a Japanese photobook. Yet, the enigmatic crowds moving across the hilly landscape are uncannily reminiscent of the 1994 election queues, snaking towards polling stations for the first all-race elections.
Adrian Fortuin, Where Are They Going? 2024. Courtesy the artist and Guns & Rain
There is also Butcher Boy Blue’s (2024), his take on Jane Alexander’s legendary sculpture The Butcher Boys (1985/86), which immediately reminded me of a dear friend, a medical doctor who took art as a high school subject and years later still speaks about this sculpture with awe because it was (is?) such a mainstay of South African art pedagogy. Flanked by the iconic brutes (Fortuin adds a fourth to Alexander’s three) is a slaughtered carcass, a popular image across Western painting – Rembrandt, Soutine and Bacon have all painted beef carcasses. According to the artist’s catalogue, this reference to Alexander’s sculpture points to “the haunting extensions of apartheid into the present” and “the persistence of newer forms of extraction and violence.” But more than just a critique of domestic politics, Fortuin’s abattoir scene recalls Mother’s Milk (2021) by Michael Armitage, a painting depicting a woman draped over the bars of a holding pen, her drooping breasts being suckled by piglets. Fortuin and Armitage similarly offer a disturbing depiction of human-animal relations, engaging distinct but interrelated issues of abuse of power and ecological urgencies; and both painters appear to oscillate along a strange, self-made scale of abstraction and figuration.
Adrian Fortuin, Butcher Boys Blues, 2024. Courtesy the artist and Guns & Rain.
Figurative abstraction
Fortuin cites Armitage as an influence, among many other painters including David Koloane, Edvard Munch, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, and Francisco Goya; With an Eye to Their Later Existence as Ruins (2024) is a remix of Goya’s Witches’ Flight (1798). Fortuin’s abundance of guest features and painterly samples confirms Gilles Deleuze’s proposition that “Every Painter Recapulates the History of Painting in His or Her Own Way”, expressed as a chapter title to his 1981 book, ‘Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation.’
But it is what he does with this cast of inspirations, that is interesting. For one, he approaches his source material with an awareness of and curiosity about his positioning. He described for instance, the awe of hearing the Korana language (an endangered Khoe language) for the first time in the Anthony Traill Khoisan collection at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits): Historical Papers Research Archive, and the profundity of experiencing this linguistic heritage while trying to learn more about his indigenous roots, an experience that is inaccessible to many who are unable to as easily explore their own heritage. In Korana, the word for moon and month is the same, a discovery that has influenced his approach to languaging the world in an attempt to translate that aural experience into visual language. Recurring symbols through his paintings – birds, stars, skulls – suggest that he is on track to codifying this language.
His gallery describes him as “an adventurous colourist” and yet, Fortuin only uses black and white reference images, possibly due to his background in darkroom photography. As an undergraduate student – he started an MA in Fine Art at Wits University in 2023 – he made performance installations using found objects and darkroom photography. In this body of work, many of the paintings have been painted over numerous times, sometimes with as many as seven iterations on one canvas, while he figures out what is ambiguous, what is obvious, and what is mysterious.
Recounting his beginnings as an art historian, in a 1985 special issue of the Black American Literature Forum journal, young Hilton Als said, “To see, one must possess a language which directs the eye to what is being perceived.” A story slips into the space between the two figures in the foreground of Catch and Embrace (2024) and hints at how Fortuin is both in possession of his own languages of perception and skilled at directing us to perceive in nuanced ways. There is no fixed narrative to pin down the two figures, their personalities or relationship or even the tender action of the woman falling backwards, eyes closed, into the man’s arms as he looks down at her. There is only a twilight so bright as to be haptic, a layered landscape conquered by all this light and of course, the real star of the show: the perceived tenderness of her trust.
Adrian Fortuin, Catch and Embrace, 2024. Courtesy the artist and Guns & Rain.
Timeliness
I’ve looked closely at Fortuin’s painting practice, but I imagine if one were to look closely at O’Toole curating this segment or at each of the other eight painters included alongside Fortuin, all sorts of things would start to emerge about the varied ways in which we relate to painting right now. Some sing its praises, some think that the best time to paint is when painting is declared dead, and others believe that painting died and was never resurrected. And yet, Fortuin’s work shows all these other practices that hold the medium, buttressing it through the ages. And he shows too how painting can be very conceptual, even if it is not conventionally read as such.
I thought about this a lot while looking at What Time Hides Forever in Plain Sight (2024), my favourite of the fourteen. The painting is inspired by Simon Starling’s Autoxylopyrocycloboros (2006), which formed part of the Sharjah Biennial 8. The artist describes it as documenting “a performance or, perhaps better, an action that took place on, and ultimately in, the waters of Loch Long on the West Coast of Scotland”. Involving the artist’s self-defeating voyage in a steamboat fuelled by wood cut piece-by-piece from its hull and fed into the engine’s boiler until, inevitably, it disappears into the depths of the loch. I enjoy Starling’s take on painting himself in a corner and enjoy as much Fortuin’s languid interpretation of this. If not aware that this is to be an entropic journey, one would easily think it a romantic scene, the two figures surrounded by shimmering water and undulating mountains. One figure even reclines in chilled repose, watching the other labour, sawing away at the steamboat’s planks to feed into the boiler. The form of the painting rises to the surface while the boat slowly sinks and suddenly, the bloodiness of the water makes sense.
Adrian Fortuin, What Time Hides Forever in Plain Sight, 2024. Courtesy the artist and Guns & Rain.
The ouroboros of this – former-performer Fortuin painting a performance – left me thinking of the potential for painting to be both an instrument and object of history and how the value of this need not be constrained by art as a commodity (capital C). What if the “risk-free investment” of painting could be thought of outside the lines of capital, and the sure bet success of a painting (like progressive radical economics) could be a site for advancing other causes, such as Fortuin’s equal platforming of multimedia, interdisciplinary inspirations or his integration of archival investigation, not just to better understand his indigenous roots but to interrogate how language can be figurative too and possible techniques for translating this into painting. These conceptual foundations of Fortuin’s practice are as compelling as the figurative vocabulary of the paintings themselves. That his work is conversant with the history of art is not in question. According to Teju Cole, in his catalogue essay for Kerry James Marshall’s 2018 exhibition, History of Painting:
“Every painter is in the history of painting. What makes a given painter interesting, one of the things that gives a painter a chance to be interesting, is his or her sense of where he sits in the lineage.”
Fortuin’s timeliness as a painter is in his awareness of himself in what Keorapetse Kgositsile calls the “Pastpresentfuture.” And in the fluidity of that temporal space, his critical reflection on what is included and excluded from both art and general history, the tongues denied permission to narrate their histories as well as the practices long treated as peripheral to painting, enriches the parameters of both art and history.
Adrian Fortuin, With an Eye to Their Later Existence as Ruins, 2024. Courtesy the artist and Guns & Rain.
