Angelically, devilishly good

Pretoria News, June 25, 2008, Edition 1

Angels and Demons: Diane Victor, Johan Conradie, Francois van Reenen, Fried Contemporary

Date: Until 28 June

Angels and demons have captured the public's imagination with authors such as Dan Brown, new-age gurus Doreen Virtue and Diane Cooper and movies too numerous to mention.

Recently The Golden Compass, based on Philip Pullman's fantasy fiction trilogy, was at the centre of Christian controversy over its references to demons, proving the volatile and ambiguous nature of the subject.

Millennial angst, though now somewhat dissipated, typically manifests in eschatological imagery, which proliferates with angels and demons, indicating the precarious transition between one world and the next.

While angels and demons are diametrically opposed, representing the forces of good and evil in eternal conflict with each other, they are also luminal, sometimes ambiguous figures, hovering between two worlds. The devil himself was an angel before he fell from grace. Originally the Greek word "daemon" referred to a divine or semi-divine being that provided the individual it attended with advice and information, which sounds very much like an angel to our ears.

Despite the alluring thematic hook, Diane Victor, Johan Conradie and surprise candidate Francois van Reenen have little in common as artists. Here they have been conflated to comment on a tradition that might include Hieronymous Bosch, Leonardo da Vinci, Dante Gabrielle Rosetti, Jean Delville, Francisco Goya, Francis Bacon, Matthew Brody, Minette Vari and mystical arts the world over. The depiction of angels and demons is one of the most ancient and perennial traditions in art, though their particular nature and manifestation depend on their cultural context.

These artists give specific and interesting insights into the ambiguous nature of contemporary angels and demons.

Conradie's angels are of the old-fashioned kind associated with graveyards and churches. This romantic image of angels still holds powerful sway in popular consciousness. His richly textured close-up photographs of religious icons recall a deep nostalgia for things of beauty, a remembrance of things of past.

But these days, angels and demons take other forms too, reflecting the cultural paradigm shift from religion to psychology.

When we speak of facing our demons, we usually do not refer to a supernatural force, but unconscious ones: unhealthy compulsions, guilt complexes, traumatic memories, addictions, fears and unresolved issues. This view of demons has them interiorised and integrated into the self. They are not seen as independent, malevolent spirits, though in both paradigms, they are seen to exert a negative control over us. Both paradigms recognise the individual as situated at the fulcrum of a network of influences. In a religious context, they are often supernatural, in a more modern and scientific view they are cultural and psychological. When Freud unearthed the unconscious, it was heaven and hell wrapped into one - fears, desires, bliss. The realm of the spirit world and the unconscious mind have many things in common.

While Van Reenen's art may not overtly deal with angels or demons, he has created a digital dream world inhabited by a menagerie of characters with some Surrealist tendencies, though firmly placed within a popular milieu. Crying cowboy is surely facing his demons, and exorcising them. His animated self is literally crying himself a river, or a large pond. As an abject substance, tears are taboo and doubly so because they indicate an excess of emotion, which in a bureaucratic system such as ours, is undesirable. But this image communicates with comic simplicity a forcefully archetypal image of cathartic sorrow.

Victor's work is famously "demonic" in that she has made a career out of personifying human vice. Her skill and versatility is represented here with work from three different series. With the all-white embossed prints of mutant skeletons, she strips down to the bare essentials, subtly moulding her primal ideas directly onto paper. Her iconographic and Baroque tendencies surface in the metallic red, diamanté-studded etched plates.

Victor's Stained Angel, part of a series of drawings made with charcoal stains, has the aura of angel, the impressive wing span - until you inspect the details. A cauterised arm and graphically outlined female genitalia makes this an ambiguous angel who has more to do with the carnal and corporeal world than the spirit world. For Victor the world of angels and demons is all too human.

But for her the stains have a beauty all their own, and imperfection needn't be demonic.

This show is worth visiting for the fact that it brings together the work of three interesting and accomplished local artists.