WHATIFTHEWORLD
03.02 - 16.03.2024
During the flux of the recent art fair, I had the privilege of joining a walkabout at WHATIFTHEWORLD where Chris Soal detailed what flows in the undercurrent of his latest solo exhibition, ‘Surface Tension’. I found myself standing in front of a broad wall of eroded sandpaper… while at the same time, somehow, I was looking out over the ocean. The work, The Expanse (To See The World In A Grain Of Sand) helped me to pretend that the overlapping chatter was water breaking at the shore. The ominous image of deep blue water expands my perception of sandpaper, here, as both medium and canvas. My hands itched to reach out and feel the texture, and to push back against the depth of my perception of the impressions. The neat curl of the remaining paper reminded me through the blocked print on the revealed underside that this window I was looking out of, is in fact made of the fine grit of Norton P180.
Chris Soal, The Expanse (To See The World In A Grain Of Sand), 2024. Courtesy of WHATIFTHEWORLD and the artist. Photographed by Matt Slater
The show title encapsulates Soal’s engagement with his chosen materials, and their malleability made possible by his vision for this next phase of their lives. To not accept the superficial, definitive and often wasteful function of the likes of sandpaper, bottle caps and toothpicks has made room for the artist to extend his visual rhythm — also challenging form as he builds into the beyond. “Through these works, I not only seek to challenge conventional notions of printmaking and artistic practice, but also to offer new perspectives on the nature of creativity and existence. As we navigate the complexities of our world, it is possible to find inspiration in the subtle beauty of the tension between what is seen and what lies beneath, between what is known and what is yet to be discovered,” Soal explained.
The woodblock impressions underpinning the majority of this collection are the result of “the better part of three years” of refining techniques, tools and materials. “A chance observation with a sheet of sandpaper almost 8 years ago sparked the journey that has led me here. It was the worn wood grain revealed by a sheet of sandpaper wrapped around a small block of wood for a hasty sanding job that caught my eye, suggesting the material’s potential for printmaking. Influenced by my experiences and exposure to traditional relief woodblock printmaking, I was drawn to the ways in which this way of working subverted the inversion of that process, as well as the implicit irony of eroding that which erodes, and how this could allow me to expand my sculptural practice into two dimensions while still retaining the material engagement that is core to my practice,” the artist continued.
Chris Soal, The Things That Only Time Will Teach You, 2024. Courtesy of WHATIFTHEWORLD and the artist. Photographed by Matt Slater
The variation in visuality informed by a multidimensional approach to a single material (not to detract from the use of stainless steel, glass fibre, concrete, motor car oil, rebar, pine wood, tape and steel pins) is what impresses me the most about the body of work. The output portrays a sense of being ‘organic’ somehow, or rather intuitive as if the artist has tapped into the current of energy inside of the material, surpassing its surface and forming something true to that innate design. I think of his serpentine bottle cap sculptures beside the large-scale stratum structure of sandpaper discs which make up, The Things That Only Time Will Teach You, which Soal demonstrates can turn on its invisible wheels as he moves the sculpture back and forth. While each of the works is distinguished, their commonalities speak highly of Soal’s dedication to detail, depth and expressive desires, and the conversations that he’s using his projects to land, saying, “This body of work reflects my belief in the material as more than a mere conduit for ideas; it possesses its own narratives and histories. Whether in the free-standing sculptural pieces or the wall-based works, the material’s specificities and conventions are the facilitator and director of form, acting as a membrane for images to surface through it. This core theme of form as facilitator and material as membrane presents for me a model for a visualisation of the creative process, which I see in some form or other is in constant dialogue with the processes at play within nature.”
By adding movement into the equation of the mountain of a sculpture that is, The Things That Only Time Will Teach You, the dynamic of the work shifts as well, an upward rippling motion taking my mind’s eye to our city’s surrounding quarries, but which cue Soal’s recollections of the erosion forms that he “grew up observing on the side of the mine dumps in Johannesburg”. The sculpture is mesmerising if only to appreciate it as evidence of such a Herculean undertaking achieved in six months, which included a late rush to acquire more sandpaper. The contrasts among the layers speak to the sourcing process as well as the underlying symbolism attaching the artist’s work to further conversations about environmental awareness: waste and accumulation —both natural and unnatural— in our relationship to the physical earth.
Index, a corner of concrete with veins of rebar met with yellow sheets of sandpaper, extends this conversation by conveying to me a notion of the future as if the artwork is an example of the turning point between what is left behind and what becomes of it. Perhaps, then, the entire show is. Index doesn’t feel like an exercise in juxtaposition, but rather one of melding and material mutation. I’m urged to think of what kind of sea change these membranes will undergo next. As their lives continue adjacent to ours, defined as they are by our consumption and failures, what becomes of our environment and our portrayal of it? I become fixated on the idea of the forced beauty that emerges through coexistence, even among the detritus and decay of our demands. I wonder what rhythms the artist will continue to uncover as he spends time undefining matter, and about the temporal interjections his process poses. I imagine for him a kind of music lifting from layers upon layers of material history, riddled together, for better and worse, their reverberating tensions converging on our shared surface, whose sounds he transcribes for us, the audience, making a new world for us to step into.