Featured Artist
JACO ROUX
2 Landscapes, Christopher Moller Gallery www.christophermollerart.co.za
I
n some ways I suspect we always inhabit two landscapes: one is the visual terrain which we perceive by sight predominantly, gazing out onto the distance; and this is perhaps augmented by the sounds of insects, wind or fauna and even the unique scents offered by the South African bushveld, should that be the landscape we are contemplating. The other landscape we inhabit is physically the same but is apprehended physically, not through a static gaze. We walk, traverse, encounter, stumble, engage. These two landscapes may seem to be one, however, experience is not the same as looking. One is viscerally active; the other perhaps more passive and contemplative.
The abiding feature of Jaco Roux’s paintings of landscapes is his seemingly magical ability to traverse these two states and, in my view, it is what sets his painting apart from so many other ‘landscapists’. For his paintings are not indolent ‘gazings out’ on a passive terrain but rather deeply energetic and highly activated explorations into the terrain he paints. His canvases exude energy, vitality and brim over with the life that resides in the domains he portrays. The deep love and respect he has for the land he selects to convey through his artworks are plain to see for anyone who stands before his work: marks that do not describe as much as evoke; colours that allude to, but do not slavishly replicate the ineffably ungraspable beauty of the open veld. The ‘naturalistic portrayals’ (if one can call them that for, as I have just argued they are more evocations of invocations of both sight and experience) of the beautiful open spaces of nature are Venda Landscape II, 100 x 100 cm
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