AVA Gallery
07.08 - 25.09.2025
“You can light it with the sun. It’s visible to the whole world, and because it’s so familiar, nobody sees it.” – Godfrey Reggio
In Stefan Raubenheimer’s work, with its monocolour tone—where graphite rubs into heavy Fabriano paper like scorched earth—shapes are not as easily distinguishable as the anguish of its stripped scenery, where wind whips and howls, and the air is cold. At first, a simple set of landscapes, charming little windows. After a moment’s pause, a warning—or perhaps a prophecy—for our sinking planet appears.
Technically adept, but not an artist by trade, Raubenheimer’s landscapes are straightforward in their approach and conceptual musings. The pieces do not attempt to recreate the sublime observations of Old Masters, nor do they try to depart from them in the same radical stride as painters like Pierneef or Hugo Naudé. Perhaps it’s because these pieces opt for charcoal and graphite out of raw necessity, their symbolism of a carbon world only an afterthought for an artist constrained by a lack of studio space, spare time, or embedded practice.
Despite its lack of overt radicalism, the dragging charcoal clouds that hover over the earth speak of a universal prayer for time lost. A Climate Development Finance man by trade, specialising in sustainability strategies for the Global South, Raubenheimer is admittedly driven by a “sadness” and “loneliness” of the heart, one which leads him to map the declining destinations of his dreams. Perhaps only imaginings, they seem to represent all of the places advocacy and litigation couldn’t save.
Stefan Raubenheimer, Africa l, 2022
In Floor Under Orion and Amazonas I-II, calibration lines stand out in red and pink, like an inky pen leaving marks on a blueprint, or an astrologist charting stars on night skies. These markings are the few remnants of human rationality, for the canvases are remarkably desolate otherwise. In Nightwalk, the expanse of the Karoo bush awaits with dreamlike desert air. In Africa, graphite acts like a windbreak and drainage system for oncoming storms. Even so, the heralded floods and fires of Raubernheimer’s nightmares push on.
In this world, both past and future, where the bridges are long-buried, and the people far-gone, devastation seems inevitable and necessary, disruptive only inasmuch as it is related to industrial productivity or progress. But for the remaining species, the ghosts of ancient Caledonia trees, the insects that swarm above wetlands, and the fungi that feed on organic matter, the cycle will continue without us, and long after us. Raubenheimer sees our fear for the future, and asks, “What’s the endgame? What’s beyond the endgame?” For all our science and innovation, our sense of control over institutions and industry, this exhibition reflects a world at odds with delusions of grandeur and immortality.
Stefan Raubenheimer, Amazonas I, 2021
Remember this Land exists in memoriam of the land that cradled humankind through its slow-spanning devastation. Raubenheimer describes this devastation like a cancer spreading through the body of a denialist. Its impacts are invisible, giving way only in moments of disaster and nausea, all-consuming flood breaks and haemorrhaging organs. In the face of such unpredictable loss, urgency rushes through one’s blood. Yet, paradoxically, we are paralysed by inaction—a sense of futility that arrives in place of self-preservation.
And with it, our memories erode. As film director Godfrey Reggio notes on landscapes as protectors of memory and presence, “You can light it with the sun. It’s visible to the whole world, and because it’s so familiar, nobody sees it.” Time seems to wane to and fro in rhythm with a violent windsong whose melody has no chorus, only a beginning and an end.
“What is wrong with us?” asks Raubenheimer. ”What’s gone wrong with our memory and our sense of self-preservation, our sense of the importance of the enabling conditions of life, which are oxygen and grass and earth and water and so on? What has happened to us that we, unlike the First Peoples, don’t have a sense of the most important thing, more important than the Internet and Instagram and electric cars?”
Stefan Raubenheimer, Embers, 2022
Although he may not intend to be confrontational, Raubenheimer’s choice of medium and matter elicits political consideration for the wider art industry and its approach to meaning-making. In a contemporary South African art scene, where race and identity discourse dominate fairs, and commercial viability is constantly at odds with the artist’s unspoken mandate to call for radical reform, can there be room for one man’s heartfelt expression of longing and loss for the land? At a time when politics is driven by identity, can something as mutual as collective human extinction resonate with a fragmented people? And further, in the experimental and conceptual push for new formats and new scale, can landscape art (in all its tradition and associated sterility) matter to an audience or an art scene as heavily conceptual and theory-driven as our own?
Beyond answering the loaded philosophical questions that this exhibition unintentionally asks, it is ultimately Raubenheimer’s authentic motivation to make, to think, to feel, to commemorate, that leaves a lasting impression. Despite what some may call naivety, it is the simplicity of his format that allows us to reckon with a sense of shared responsibility. Far from implicit meaning, clever rationalisations, deep theoretical and historical odes, his work recalls what painter and sculptor Anselm Kiefer once told us: “Landscape is not innocent. It contains traces of catastrophe.” Among these traces of human catastrophe, of pain and injustice, Raubenheimer reflects on “things called wetlands, and things called altocumulus clouds, and things called trees. They make you possible, you and your identity, and they come before anything else. They make you real.”
This review was produced as a part of the AVA Art Writing Workshop, facilitated by Keely Shinners. This project was made possible thanks to the support by the City of Cape Town.
