L’ACTE FINAL: LOUIS & KIE
An exhibition by Louis Jansen van Vuuren and thirteen fellow artists Gallery University Stellenbosch 25 Feb – 15 March 2019
J
ansen van Vuuren created this body of work to celebrate his seventieth birthday with his fellow artist friends. It evolved a year ago in his ST Silvian Bas Le Roc atelier in rural France. The series was completed in his West coast studio at Cape St Martin during the past three months. He finds the contrast of the two locations exhilarating and inspirational. The content and focus of the work are undeniably linked to the particular season of his life. A time during which questions about the self and life’s meaning becomes more apparent. It is not only the physical changes that are pulled into focus but it is the shift in values and cognisance that manifests resolutely. Decent from source, the inward journey and the transforming relationship and perilous state of the environment and society becomes the base of the pictorial inquiry. Memory and desire, recollection and consanguinity saturate the visual narrative like a stain. It becomes an avalanche of pentimenti; visible traces of human endeavor veiled beneath layers and layers of existence. Photography with its myriad contemporary applications, computer technology, and digital reproduction gets absorbed into the initial creative conceptualization. Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom become the stand-in for the ancient camera obscura and camera lucida. These become indispensable tools for the 21st Century’s artist. Advanced technologies blends happily with traditional artist’s techniques. Jansen van Vuuren turns to his Dutch ancestry for inspiration. The work of Johannes Vermeer, Willem Kalf and Melchior de Hondecoeter serve as a source of reference from which he takes visual elements and combines it with shards of porcelain that hang eerily in a silent space. Louis Jansen van Vuuren, Ancestral Voices oil on canvas
32
