Gwen van Embden

Mountain+Water

Talk by Dr Rayda Becker at Gwen van Emden’s exhibition at the Association of Visual Arts Gallery

Cape Town 12th April - 20 May 2017

Opening remarks for Gwen van Emden’s exhibition: Mountain Water

There are many different ways to look and read art works.

Keeping that open-endedness in mind I will simply add a few ideas gleaned from

conversation with Gwen and from the readings she threw my way. My focus, though,

will deal with adaptations and accommodations in her work to outside sources (the

nature of influences) both theoretical and practical and suggest how she has made

them her own and how they can provide entry points into her work.

Gwen has a background in philosophy and that informs much of her practice. For

this series of works she read the contemporary French philosopher Francois Jullien,

one of today’s leading thinkers on inter-cultural relations between China and the

West. Trained as a classical philosopher (we have all heard of Aristotle), Jullien

nevertheless sought to question assumptions and our ready acceptance that our

thinking has evolved from classical Greece. He needed a source that was

independent of Indo-European and Arab histories and languages and chose China.

To quote “China offered an outside point from which I could put European thought

into perspective and where I could take a step back”. A point of exteriority that

allowed Jullien to return to Europe via a detour and question things that Europeans

generally take for granted. The journey invited looking at Chinese art and landscape

painting, He wrote a book titled The Great Image has no form; or the non-object

through painting which Gwen devoured. Seeing Europe via China is what Gwen took

from Jullien. The title of the exhibition: Mountain and Water is from him as they are

the two words used to describe Chinese landscape painting. Landscape painting

ultimately then can exist in two elements.

For Gwen her landscapes are not about particular scenes in one-point perspective.

Rather they are inventions using space and marks and large or small gestures,

moving beyond the confines of the edges of the canvas suggesting continuity like the

land itself. They are more about the landscape as an idea and what a landscape

can become. They are landscapes without colour resolutely painted in black on

white.

Yesterday a critic walked in looked around and responded with “obliteration”, another

viewer said “holocaust.” To both some black marks suggested destruction and

burning (get the multiplicity) based on the manipulation of the marks. There are no

pretty flowers or green rolling hills here, but a sense of an unease and discomfort

from an unknown threat, the anxiety and insecurity when the familiar is disrupted;

heterotopias which unsettle as opposed to utopias which reassure and idealise

(Jullien citing Foucault). Most science fiction takes place in future dystopias. It is not

coincidental that these works were started when the body of a three year old Syrian-

Kurdish boy (Aylan Kurdi) was washed ashore in Turkey.

Of course this is not all - many works are less worrying and are more about the

forces of form and mark, some look like calligraphy, some are calm and spacious.

There is another strain in the works which has been informed, affected, or

influenced, if you like, by the work of the American Abstract Expressionist painter,

Robert Motherwell and his Elegies to the Spanish Republic. The three large works

on canvas in the exhibition here are each titled Elegy. Motherwell painted a series of

over 200 works starting in 1948 dealing initially with the horrors of the Spanish Civil

War (hence the title) and in response to the poetry of the American Harold

Rosenberg and the writing of Spaniard Federico Garcia Lorca. Motherwell’s elegies

are painted in black on white horizontal canvasses, like a landscape format, divided

by two or three dominant verticals, many with bulges. But these numerous elegies,

while evocative, are not ultimately illustrative of political events but rather a general

mediation of life and death, a metaphor for Motherwell’s ruminations on the

experience of living (www.mnetmuseum.org>collection>...). So too for Gwen her

works are meditations realized in gestural, painterly marks delivered it seems quickly

and where the accidental is important, in large formats. Processes which affirm that

the paintings are rooted in a contemporary western tradition.

One point I can’t resist making is that in conversation two small words in English

and/or became more meaningful than their size suggests. The engagement with

China led to thinking about oppositional discourses in the west caught in the word

dichotomy - things are black or white, up or down, good or evil, male or female. In

the east it is different – it is black and white, red and yellow, mountain and water, yin

and yang. In turn this made me rethink the notion of dichotomies when thinking

about African art, especially in the work of Jackson Hlungwani. Things, it seems to

me now, are more about co-relationships than opposites - things exist

simultaneously and not exclusively and not despite the other.

Holding multi-valence in mind, I would like to end with a quotation from the text by

Gwen, who says it best:

Black and white, ink and brush, quiet and un-calm - thought-things shaped by the

emotionality of artistic action. The works are structured around order and disorder,

harmony and destruction. Quiet and calm are transposed into unrest. The

emergence of the forms come together as complementary forces in productive

harmony.

It remains for me to congratulate Gwen on this remarkable body of work and invite

you to look holding multiplicity of reading in mind and perhaps starting a

conversation with one or two of them.

Rayda Becker

12 April 2017