Pretoria News,
November 09, 2006 Edition 1
Miranthe Staden-Garbett
Exhibition: Shelf Life - Rossouw van der Walt, Marili de Weerdt, Nathani
Luneberg
Venue: Fried Contemporary
Date: Until 11 November
As you enter, the first thing you see is a life-size sculpture of a man
hanging upside down, trapped inside his shirt. Inside, the same artist, Rossouw
van der Walt, presents the viewer with a smaller male figure sitting on the
edge of a bed, behind him, another figure is hidden under the sheets. As a
backdrop to this scene, a diptych by Marili de Weerdt entitled Dreamers roughly
depicts a woman and man tossing and turning restlessly. In the same room,
Nathani Luneberg's elfish Lovers both grin and grimace at each other.
Shelf Life explores, through different media, the effects of time and the
human figure as it oscillates between isolation and relationship, fear and
love, wholeness and disintegration.
Luneberg presents four whimsical animations and various prints. She has
developed a unique means of evoking the fragile and mutable quality of life,
mind and relationships that is in works that are both magical and menacing.
While Luneberg's world is buoyant and lively, Van der Walt's is cold and
deathly still. His sculptures have an eerie classical beauty. Yet the artist
chooses to disrupt this delicate perfection by means of various disconcerting
strategies, most prominently by smothering some of his figures with
cockroaches. This creates an ambiguous play of attraction and repulsion. Van
der Walt's rendition of the Pieta is particularly curious, making it look as if
somehow the Mary figure, looking more like a crone than a virgin, has, through
some powerful magic, jettisoned baby Jesus against the wall. I feel the
artist's clean classical style could do without the gross factor. Yet, in
keeping with the theme, Van der Walt triggers our aversion to illustrate our
ever-increasing inability to deal with decay and dirt.
Judging by her mix of stylesand media, De Weerdt is still finding her feet.
I thought her Fade 1 and 2 showed the most potential.
In these pieces a deceptive surface decorativeness conceals violent
undercurrents. The sleeping dog/wicked wolf motif features subtly throughout
the work of De Weerdt and Luneberg.
These three artists, each with their light and dark sides, are well suited
to each other, and their compatibility makes this show a curatorial success.