Against a narrow heart

Against A Narrow Heart

CHRISTIAAN CONRADIE

CONTENTS

Against a narrow heart - by Ashraf Jamal

Ataraxia - by Sven Christian pg. 1 - 40 pg. 45 - 57

THE UNREDEEMABLE PRESENT by Ashraf Jamal

In his quiet way Christiaan Conradie reminds me that he does not paint portraits. It’s reasonable to assume that he does. Looking at his paintings, one supposes an intimacy between sitter and painter, something contractual and commemorative, the reboot of an age-old tradition. His figures are largely older men. They are aware that they’re being looked at. In traditional Western portraiture this sighting — the economy and culture of ‘the look’ — supposes patronage and power. The history of portraiture is predominantly the history of powerful men, be they secular figures, in the case say of Piero della Francesca’s painting of Federico da Montefeltro or Hans Holbein’s ‘ambassadors’ of trade, or sacred fantasies, in the case of Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, a painting of Christ, saviour of the world, doubtless modelled on a commissioned sitter. This, despite da Vinci’s peculiar remark that ‘he was unwilling to seek a model on earth and unable to presume that his imagination could conceive of the beauty and celestial grace required of divinity incarnate’.

Whether profoundly felt or ad-speak, the opacity of Salvator Mundi raises one key question: To what extent is one able to record a face in paint? If photography produces an ‘abduction’, never an objective record, then what of the painted face or body? Historically caught between the Hellenic ideal in which visages enshrine an idea of grace or strength, and a secular ideal which sought to reveal the manifest presence of powerful men, Western painting, it seems, was always trapped in hubris and folly.

‘Divinity’ is no less a construct than, say, a portrait of Lisa del Giaconda — the Mona Lisa. Both reveal the tenuousness of a sacred and secular record. The mystery we assign to the Mona Lisa belongs to all faces. Portraiture always conceals far more than it discloses. Therein lies its pathos and crux. If our obsession with the Mona Lisa tells us anything, it is that we are drawn to the void that faces invoke. The penitential who line-up in droves before this ‘enigmatic’ half-smiling face to take selfies reveal the fetish of mystery, and our desire to smilingly record ourselves in relation to it. But the proof of co-presence merely underwrites the impossibility of ever becoming one with another, whether god-like or secularly mystical.

If Da Vinci has a point regarding his reimagined Christ, it is that no imagination, despite insistence to the contrary, ever affords a seamless reciprocity. ‘The beauty and celestial grace required of divinity incarnate’ — a quality subsequently ascribed to Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, a glowingly ordinary depiction of maidenhood — reminds us that despite the impossibility of this actuality, we persist in this fantastical pursuit. More than any other painterly concern, portraiture marks the limit of human possibility. It is a dreamscape, a lung, that point when we stumble most definitely. If portraiture is aerobic, it also sucks out all of the air, replacing the fallibility of human existence with a deeply acculturated and consensually imagined oxygen. This is no more striking than at the Louvre, where nonsensicality and fantasy converge.

Pictures of your saints hanging crooked from the drywall Oil on canvas 175cm x 140cm 2021

In a room surrounded by portraits, few care to linger. Their attention is consumed by the Mona Lisa, which to my mind’s eye resists the mystique we ascribe to it.

Art history has much to answer for in this regard, but so does the business of its commodification. The exceptionalism of Da Vinci is no virtue. That more people visited the absent space where the Mona Lisa hung after its theft in 1911 reminds us that we will cling to a reverential experience, even when its cognitive object is absent. A physical absence is another expression for what we yearn for and fear — the void. Divination and secularism both tell us that we cannot sustain life without the fetish of grace and the existential need for connection, despite the fact that neither are wholly afforded by painting. Rather, what we experience is the desire or need for consecration. We believe in the claims, passed down through centuries, that great portraiture consoles. How so? What is it about ‘great’ portraiture that ratifies this belief? In my view, nothing, but belief, like any avidly held ideology, defies scrutiny. Are our connections with great portraits culturally schooled, intuitive, or both? Do portraits possess their hold on us precisely because they resist both reason and faith?

My presumption is that incarnation, whether religious or secular, is constructed. In Anil’s Ghost, Michael Ondaatje tells us of a man painting the eyes on a statue of Buddha. He can only paint the demigod’s eyes at five in the morning — ‘the hour that Buddha attained enlightenment’ — with the aid of a metal mirror. Why? Because that sacral depiction is, perforce, indirect.

‘No human eye can meet the Buddha’s during the process of creation’. Lenses were also used by Vermeer. It seems that indirection is the inevitable route towards consecration. Is painting a portrait with the aid of a photograph any different? Is portraiture not a fundamentally obtuse practice? And isn’t this why portraiture holds our attention more forcibly than any other painted object or scene?

Is it because mortality — the sacred is also the sum of mortality — offers no other point of entry? As the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze reminds us, inexactitude is the exact path of something that is done, and not an approximation. Is this because proximity is by-the-by, secondary; because what we believe we experience when looking at a great portrait is an action — the painter’s peculiar expression, their animus — in the moment a painted face comes into view? No matter how fixed or mute, we insist upon a portrait's fleeting living presence. This is because they are mediums between worlds: one that sees and another that is seen, forever looped, forever locked in a momentary embrace that is scored into that reciprocal moment by a void.

Between them towns

Mixed media on paper 50cm x 35cm 2021

Oaxaca,

A painted portrait hovers between substance and nothingness, conjecture and enigma, detail and everything detail cannot register.

Da Vinci associates the flow and fall of hair with the movements of waves and water. In the finest detail of a strand he sees enigmatic energy at work, structure and its endless dissipation. Nothing is hard and fast. A painting of a face is an aggregative forcefield. ‘Sfumato’ is the name he gives to this contiguous connection. It is painting ‘without lines or border, in the manner of smoke or beyond the focus plane.’ The fascination with gradations in a blur should remind us that a portrait, great or not, is always as airy as it is focused, as impenetrable as it is penetrable, as unknowable as it is knowable. Both the painter and viewer straddle this annulus. In the moment of connection, we inevitably miss the point, despite our belief to the contrary.

Whether inspired by faith or the mystery and dross of everyday life, a portrait is not a real or authentic rendition of the subject. It is an invention on the part of the painter, and the inherited culture that informs them.

Likeness to the sitter may be apparent — one may find a resemblance — but likeness also supposes a discrepancy. If one thing is ‘like’ another, it is because it is not.

The trick, whose root lies in mimesis, is to suppose verisimilitude where none exists. Realism, in other words, is a dream, a confection. Portraiture, which traditionally enshrines this trick, has for centuries proved its consummate agent. That portraiture is traditionally associated with power further underscores its collusion with the reality effect.

What we are sold is the Realism of Power — the Emperor’s new clothes. How else is power to convince us of its authority if not through the potency and rarity of portraiture — the likelihood of likeness?

A gifted portrait artist is no copyist. The persuasiveness of their craft supposes a digging down, a digging in, buoyed by the assumption and ruse that their subject contains a definable or boundless truth.

We want to believe this. After all, what are we looking at if not some truth on the painting’s surface, in its fold of existence and essence? A visit to the National Gallery in London gifted me with such an encounter. It was a small painting by Anthony van Dyck, closely cropped and shorn of any suggestive backdrop — a bare globe-like head painted against a dark background, the figure’s pedigree and station marked only by a shimmering ruffled collar. The painting was of a businessman, a burgher — Cornelis van der Geest. It is quite unlike Van Dyke’s paintings for the court of King Charles I, two of which, a husband and wife, are housed side by side in Tate Britain. The pair exude all the sanctimony of station, but the painting of the lone figure, shorn of context, has stayed with me since I first saw it in 2018. It harboured no self-possessed attitude, no complacency, no easy comfort. If I was drawn to this portrait, it is because it leapfrogged across time. It was palpably present, rheumy eyed, utterly life-like, and yet on closer inspection, emphatically painted. The tautly drawn skin possessed a thinness and infinite fragility.

The bared forehead similarly signalled this temperament and condition. It is the eyes, we’re told, which reveal the truth. In a living face, perhaps, but in a painting in which all of life, every contour and indentation, is modelled? Surely the eyes are not the only portal?

Over and above the fragility of the person painted, what drew my attention was a squab of roughly applied paint on the figure’s brow. It conveyed a furrowing, but it also refused it. What remained apparent in a painting wholly committed to verisimilitude — a depthful likeness — was the artist’s decision to leave behind the rudiments of his profession. Given the meticulous rendition of the collar and the tenderness of the painted visage, was this wild and bold detail deliberate, the result of time? It reminds me that painting portraits — an economic and cultural activity — is first and last about painting. The rest, the way one paints, will not emerge without first understanding what compels the painter to paint. In that encrusted painterly flurry lay the artist’s signatory resistance to sfumato, some smoky equilibrium, some drowsy and consummate blurring. In that moment, Van Dyck sought to impress upon us his touch. Over and above his capture of a tender and fragile being, there appears the tactile fact of paint. Despite its likeness, this work is not merely commemorative. It is no court painting, with all the largess and egoism court painting assumes. It is a profoundly mortal work, one that signals both life and death, the miracle of an organism and the bacterium that is paint.

In his brief introduction to Roy Bolton’s compendium, Painting: 2000 BC to AD 2000, Matthew Collings touches on the fact that the way a painter paints is never invisible. Sfumato is as tactical as any fauvist gesture. However, Collings has some stern words to say about tradition, in this case the tradition of portraiture, which contemporary artists on the confused cusp of the twentieth and twenty-first century sought to disparage. It is important to note that Collings’ essay was published in 2004. Since then we have witnessed a profound volte face. Nevertheless, Collings’ argument deserves our attention because it challenges a mirthless irony that is still deeply rooted. ‘The typically successful painting will often quote from the tradition of painting, but the reference is always deliberately shallow and trivial. It’s really about painting up in a spirit of black humour or despairing glee — our modern difference from the past, not our connection to it’. This dissociative manoeuvre speaks volumes about the trauma of loss. ‘This new type of painting is fascinated by futility and impotence’, Collings resumes. ‘Art culture generally is about fast, empty stimulation … Its products are often amusing but never genuinely playful, or genuinely free, and consequently never really serious — only either trivial or solemn or both’.

The

While I believe Collings to be on point about a particularly haunting moment in painting’s history, we are also witnessing a profound shift, a return to portraiture as the surest connective tissue between the past and present, tradition and our deeply introspective moment. It is not only painting which has returned with a profound urgency, but painted faces and bodies, which strive to countermand irony, doubt, or wanton contempt. Painting has returned to the epicentre of the art world because it is better suited than any other medium to address our human condition. In recent years we have witnessed an increased desire to secure connection, to speak each to each. In painting there is no other vehicle better suited to communicate this than portraiture. If Collings is dismissive of the vanity and error of painting, circa 2004, he is also prescient, because what interests him — and what I found interesting about Van Dyck’s portrait — is not only the complexity of the subject, but its rendering, what he describes as painting’s ‘inner life’:

What I’m doing is pointing out the difference between the inner life of painting and painting’s subject matter, and also the difference between painting’s inner life and the personal biography of the artist. I think this inner life becomes more available and see-able through being examined again and again in every context conceivable — which includes the historical and social meanings, the artist’s life, ideas and thoughts, and the relationship to the times generally and to patrons and bosses. But I also believe in what Modernism teaches us, that the use the painting has in the end, if the painting is important, is to do with its identity as a painting, and not the surrogate it offers through imagery, history, documentation and recording and so on, of various other experiences.

By shifting the focus away from biography, social context, and history, Collings returns us to matter — paint. This view is prescient because it straddles and overrides two ills: the withering irony of the recent past and the hysterical urgency of our present. For while true that this historical moment is committed to human connection, it is also riven by division — an identitarian raceand gender-fixated optic. It is not a universal humanity we seek, but one that is profoundly and negatively impacted by histories of patriarchy, colonialism, and their persistence in a different imperial and oppressive guise. While one can reasonably challenge Collings’ valorisation of painting outside and beyond biography and tradition — they are incommensurably connected — I do see a value in his manoeuvre. He is asking us, as I have done, to see painting as zoonotically connected to biography and tradition. It is painting as a bacterium which best reveals the truth of the human condition; which accounts for the folly of desire, the yearning for consolation, the mis-take that is history and culture. But painting also contains the possibility to rethink a given culture and tradition. It allows us to enter its paradox — the fact that it both tells and confounds a truth. The Mona Lisa, Salvator Mundi, and Girl with a Pear Earring are not the sum of the conditions which made them possible. In each resides a void which overrides context, defies the conditional. It is that point where the sacred and secular converge, pull away, and reconverge differently — the fate of all painting, given the differing moments in time in which they are apprehended — that allows for a more deft reading of creative possibility, and the defining place of portraiture therein. Portraiture can bond us to the political or it can absorb and express this drive in ways that are unique and singular, because of the power and genius of the painter.

Bleeding

On this occasion, that painter is Christiaan Conradie. Thirty-eight and South Africa born, he requires no sitter, accepts no commission, preferring to rely on photographs that he has taken or found. It is not because a living model is a quaint throwback or because attending to a photograph is easier that he adopts this approach. It is not a likeness he seeks but what people, known and unknown, allow him to convey. It is because of something as fundamental as paint which portraits allow — mystery. If Conradie’s take is compelling, it is because he has absorbed tradition but also skewed it. The technique and crop are familiar. Technically, Conradie does not depart from a long-established tradition of painting bodies. He is not, for example, altering the way we see flesh. In contrast to an artist like Amoako Boafo — perhaps the most celebrated portrait artist in 2020 — Conradie is not technically changing the means to incarnate and see the body. After Collings, he refuses a rupture with the past, asking us to value continuation while absorbing the untimely nature of that absorption. In his paintings, tradition engages synergetically with modernism — he connects time. This is achieved by giving primacy to painting-as-identity, for as Collings notes, ‘if the painting is important’, it has to do with its ‘identity as a painting’ and not its surrogacy ‘through imagery, history, documentation’. If Conradie’s paintings are idiomatic of this moment in history, it is because of their power of absorption in which, as T.S. Eliot phrases it in ‘Burnt Norton’, the first of his Four Quartets,

Time present and time past

Where all the mice behave like men - Oil on canvas, 67cm x 87cm, 2021

Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present

time is unredeemable.

The error lies in seeing time consecutively and progressively. The past exists in the present, and both can guide us toward the future, which is never elsewhere but everpresent. This mantra-rune-epistemologytemperament distinguishes Conradie’s portraiture. That he directs us to this interpretation without forcing the matter — whether through deference or irony, by enslaving himself to tradition or by reactively challenging it — reveals a slow burn. Conradie’s paintings inhabit space. They enthral the viewer without ever revealing the artist’s hand, his intention. There is never any ‘empty stimulation’, never any honorific genuflection. Instead, he places us in the midst of a drifting world, as connected as it is unmoored, afloat, suspended between two undefinable points: Then and Now. His suturing of these asymmetrical points is tenuous and tenebrous — tender, fragile, shadowy.

What

Everything in a Conradie painting hangs on temperament; what it is the painter feels, infers, reimagines. He confounds context, what one expects from the conditions of a relational experience — painter-sitterviewer — and what their intersection allows. Because no agreement is established in advance, nothing is contractual or commemorative. Conradie’s paintings veer away from the received conditions implied in both a sacred and secular economy of portraiture. That his subjects are unheralded further amplifies the artist’s desire to free himself from any conditional exchange. Jeanette Winterson’s formulation in Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery is of great purpose in this regard: ‘To be ill-adjusted to a deranged world is not breakdown’. How so? The dissonance one experiences when looking at a Conradie portrait, its familiarity and strangeness, is a productive reply to a synapse. If ours is a ‘deranged world’, one without the capacity for arbitration, void of any central ballast or centrifugal hold, a world out of whack — disconnected to the past, deprived of a future — what must one do? Conradie’s answer is to not look forward or backwards, but to hold fractured time in a ramified moment. His paintings congeal. They fuse contrary states. Instead of announcing a break, he coheres it. Against breakdown — a symptom of art which seeks to defy tradition, announce the new, or politicise the chaos in which we find ourselves — Conradie finds a stilling point in a churning world. Remaining with Winterson, consider the following two excerpts:

The true artist is interested in the art object as an art process, the thing in being, the being of the thing, the struggle, the excitement, the energy that have found expression in a particular way.

Instead of art aspiring towards lifelikeness what if life aspires towards art, towards a creative, controlled focus of freedom, outside the tyranny of matter? What if the joke about life imitating art were a better joke than we think? Are real people fictions? We mostly understand ourselves through an endless series of stories told to ourselves by ourselves and others. The so-called facts of our individual worlds are highly coloured and arbitrary, facts that fit whatever fiction we have chosen to believe in … Struggling against the limitations we place upon our minds is our own imaginative capacity, a recognition of an inner life at odds with the external figurings we spend so much time supporting … It may be that to understand ourselves as fictions, is to understand ourselves as fully as we can.

It is clear that Winterson doubts the cogency of a factual world. For her, facts are prohibitive, ‘highly coloured and arbitrary’, as are all systems designed to bend us to their will. What matters more is fiction, our ability to invent ourselves, others, and after T.S. Eliot, present ourselves before the faces that we meet. Construction is a conspiratorial agreement. Our eyes are tinted. However, beyond an inescapable dissimulation lies great art, a process that brings a ‘thing into being’ or accesses the ‘being of the thing’. Life is not merely simulacral. There exists an energy, a feeling, as inchoate as it is irresistible. It is an ‘inner life’ at odds with the scaffolding we rig to support ourselves. Having passed through the relational niceties we confect, the artist can tap into the ‘being’ of ‘the thing’. This assumption is hermeneutical — it supposes hidden depths, primal essences — but as Winterson provocatively asks: ‘Are real people fictions?’ This, too, is my point. Reality is a construct; mimesis a rhetorical ploy.

As such, the belief in a nascent or hidden truth, some ‘inner being’, can only be grasped if so desired. One invests in a belief in a core being, as certain artists do. Others are doubtful, iffy, downright sceptical. Others still are consumed by humility. It is this last attitude which becomes Conradie. While he doubts the absolute, some grail at the core of being, he does not doubt the palpable power of art to touch an impenetrable truth. What he enshrines is an ‘imaginative capacity’ — the power of painting-as-fiction to broach the snarled yearnings. If we are fictions, we are the better for it.

Reality, then, is fiction. As is portraiture. In painting, all truth is relational and contingent — we not only find a truth, we place it within the work. This is because a painting is an event, as is the person painted, and the one doing the painting. If Conradie does not consider his paintings portraits, it is perhaps because his idea of the human refuses its inherited construction. Or because he senses the fleeting quality of being. Or because he is not seduced by knowledge, whether of one’s self or another, and is far more enthralled by the generative, imaginative power of being. Pulled hither and thither, one cannot ignore the disjunctive force of his paintings. While the sitters who never sat command our attention, their environs, their worlds, force one to question the convincing naturalism of the painted subject. In Conradie’s paintings, context does not reinforce the authoritative power of selfpresence but works against its projected integrity. A queering occurs, or after Brecht, a defamiliarization. If his paintings seem open, they are also curiously closed, parenthetical, elliptical. A mystery clings to the whole, permeating all life. What distinguishes his paintings is a desire to find the intrigue that inhabits the ordinary.

Conradie’s figures are autumnal, older, though not necessarily wiser. The artist does not defer to the aged, but he is smitten by their foibles and follies — life’s pressures and excesses, dilapidation and beauty. In sum, mortality. ‘Rather than being expressive of some ideal or abstracted sense of human values,’ Conradie’s subjects ‘become the repositories of particular and explicit trajectories of lived experience,’ writes Julia Teale. For her, Conradie captures the ‘character’ or ‘personality’ of the subject. He maps ‘the bumps and lumps, the sags, wrinkles, scars and markings of something well used, or “lived in”’. ‘There are no clues offered as to these individuals’ “standing” in society. In fact, they are, while being distinct individuals, nevertheless, without identity.’ That ‘character’, ‘personality’, ‘standing’, ‘lived in’, are words Teale is compelled to qualify, or hesitantly emphasise, says much about the precarity of anything certain or unconditional in Conradie’s paintings. Neither power, truth, nor station matters. As for his figures being ‘without identity’? What and who are these personages? What are we looking at, feeling? What is the intrigue that inhabits the ordinary, nondescript, unnameable? And why, today, do portraits have such a powerful hold on us?

There is no doubt that a shift has occurred in recent years. Notwithstanding its perpetuation — the powerful still long to have their personage enshrined — portraiture, now, is the most potent democratic expression in the art world. The rise and rise of Zanele Muholi, her self-portraits currently on show at the Tate Modern, along with Lynette YiadomBoakye’s paintings at Tate Britain, tell us that more than any other requirement in the art world, it is faces we need: people, bodies, whether characterful or not, known or unknown.

We need to see ourselves in and through others, embrace our connectedness and anonymity. Instead of mirrors, we need paintings of others. The baffling resistance to having portraits of strangers in our homes is a thing of the recent past. It is not the body alone that matters but its expression — its mystery, challenge, and wonder. We yearn for the unnameable within us. After E.M. Forster, this is our defining plea: ‘ONLY CONNECT!’

Was it the great egoist, Gustave Courbet, who paradoxically enshrined the ordinarily human? With whomever and whenever one assigns this seismic shift, there is no doubt that portraiture has radically redefined its reason for being. As James Hyman notes in Contemporary Portraits Real and Imagined, ‘a new freedom is possible. Presenting unknown sitters — or rather sitters who are known to the artist but not the viewer — encourages us to view the portrait as symbolic. As a result of this freedom, it is but a short leap to conclude that the subject need not even be actual’. Here, Conradie’s qualification that he does not paint portraits returns. His paintings are not embodiments of known human beings, but subjects that ‘need not even be actual’. But how does a meticulous rendition of a relatively unknown figure assume a symbolic force? If patronage and fame have no purchase, what is it that draws us thither?

Given his love of Mexico or his peculiarly southern sensibility, one cannot ignore Conradie’s affection for mystique, but to my mind it is not the paintings’ symbolism that matters most. Julia Teale places the pressure exactly — Conradie’s greater passion is for the incidental and ordinary. His figures refuse symbol. He is not searching for some grand abstraction. His paintings are not weighted with the Idea of the Human. They do not reflect the political or ideological urgencies of our time. If anything, his paintings are symptomatic — they express an urgency without remarking upon it. Everywhere one turns today, it is portraits one sees. Once derided as a privatised or institutional fetish, the human figure now governs a global optic. We want to look at people, but no longer care whether we have access to their private or public histories. It is not their symbolism that matters, but their ability to return us to ourselves, our mortality.

‘A portrait is different’, Hyman resumes. ‘It is always more than simply an image, more than merely oil on canvas or charcoal on paper. Somehow it does more than just show the subject. Part of the experience of looking at a portrait is a sense of recognition, an identification with the subject or a confirmation of our own feelings.’ All importantly, it could be both. The need to identify oneself in relation to another is the desire to become the other of oneself, to quit the maw of subjectivity and our narrow solitariness. For all the talk of connectivity through social media, desolation has metastasised. We no longer look for God in art, or the narrow comforts of one’s genealogy and family, but the greater embrace of a universal humanity. Ours is an empathic revolution.

Conradie’s paintings reflect a yearning to reach and connect with others. What intrigues me is how he arrives upon this germinal desire, how he connects us to his paintings, and where he finds himself in the moment of connection.

Mazunte, Mexico - 2016

Petacalco, Mexico - 2017

Given the over-saturation of the human image, the void built into its narcissistic assault upon the senses, it is unsurprising that we find ourselves turning to the consolatory power of painting. If photography abducts a body, registers its ghost, painting — tactile, processual, fallible — speaks to a being’s recessive and enigmatic nature. Because it is not instantaneous, because it always reveals its struggle, painting has become the defining marker for all our doubts, fears, and longings. ‘A sense of time — lacking from the snap-shot — is built into the experience of making and viewing such work. A portrait may form part of an on-going dialogue or be the epiphany of a fleeting moment’, but, regardless of whether the articulation is sudden or convoluted, it cannot escape time. Hyman’s emphasis is crucial. It is time we desire: the time it takes to paint, to look, to change an opinion or revise a feeling — to become the others of ourselves. Painting does not matter today because it confirms what we think or feel or believe. It matters because it shifts the conditions for thought, feeling, and belief. It is, therefore, not a painting’s likeness that matters most, but its ability to carry us through time, beyond the pitfalls of verisimilitude and academicism, towards the embrace of art as a living, everchanging condition. In I and Thou (1923), Martin Buber resists the ‘I-It’ exchange which treats other people as objects or as preconceived projections:

I imagine to myself what another man is at this very moment wishing, feeling, perceiving, thinking, and not as a detached content but in his very reality, that is, as a living process … The inmost growth of the self is not accomplished, as people like to suppose today, in man’s relation to himself, but in the relation between one and the other, between men.

Buber’s view emphasises intangible yet felt conditions for understanding. Against the eighteenth-century enlightenment project — typified in Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, recently rebooted in a Billie Eillish song, or the equally definitional imperative by Kant, ‘Know Thyself’ — Buber asks us to embrace lived experience and its artistic expression as an immanent and not a ‘detached content’. Collings supports this view when speaking of the ‘inner life of painting’, but connection of this kind does not allow for an alternative absolute. Faith is also a construct, no matter how compellingly experienced. In other words, while Buber’s view is in ascendance, it remains a symptom of what Stephen Colbert termed ‘truthiness’: the disposition which privileges feeling over fact. Because we find ourselves in a radically relativised world, in which one person’s fact is another’s fiction, in which we coolly speak of ‘alternative facts’, it is impossible to wholly concede to Buber’s view. Similarly, the views expressed by Da Vinci, that he is ‘a disciple of experience’, or by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that ‘True education consists less in precept than in practice,’ read as ad-speak in today’s world.

Conradie’s portraits matter in this regard because they refuse to take a position. They neither laud experience, nor imply a withering doubt. They are neither overly assured nor cynical. His paintings emerge as disjunctive hybrids — part reality part fakery, objectifiable and fantastical, traditional and modern. Why? Because they cannot, in all truth, be one thing at the expense of another. A doubled consciousness prevails, of being within and without, neither here nor there. It is their ethical and emotional uncertainty which is their greatest strength. Conradie reveals the psychic crack-up and post-existential dread of our brutal age.

Of course, there is much talk today of care in the art world, akin to the rearranging of deck chairs on a sinking ship. After all, what are we without care, no matter how precarious the situation? Nietzsche never believed in God’s death. What he threatened us with was the loss of belief, the realisation that we would no longer believe in anything other than our self-actuated surround-sound, retrofitted, wireless, psychometrical engineering. He warned us against fascism and institutional religion, the manic revivalism of which is everywhere. His threat — God is Dead — was a plea to rethink faith, bind it bodily, psychically, heartfully, so that we may not become the victims of acculturated and manipulable forces.

On an afternoon in my home, I listen to Christiaan Conradie, recently returned to South Africa, having left in 2013 for Mexico. He has exhibited and sold his work internationally for the past seven years — primarily in Europe and the US — and has just launched his first South African solo exhibition. Six foot three, blond, blue eyed, he is hardly the cache which Cape Town dealerships are looking for. I mention his bodily presence because it matters to those in the business of making money off the backs of black bodies. Everything these days fulfils an algorithm, a psychometric, some ‘in’ in the enterprise of ‘emotional capitalism’. Right now, it’s black, it’s woman, as though these discrete and massively complex categories could be reduced as such. But they are. And no more so than in the sphere of portraiture. Amy Sherald and Kehinde Wiley, famous for their portraits of the Obama’s, exemplify this pivot. If Wiley’s portraits are decorative, kitsch, tainted by the irony which Collings decried, it is because he is a latter-day court painter. His spoofing of a Van Dyck painting underscores the fact. Sherald is another matter. There is nothing inherently wrong about Wiley’s pop sensibility. All taste is cultural. My personal view, however, is that Wiley reinforces a representational limit — he constructs blackness as an idea, performs it, while Sherald, deeply reflective in her take, allows for deeper access.

If, as Francesco Garutti notes in Our Happy Life, ‘the market is now a place for selling experiences and emotions as products’, this is no more emphatically the case than in portraiture, and the marketing of the black body in particular. This is an unsurprising turn, given the rise of revisionism and the need to reassess the Western canon and white power in the art world. The question as to how pragmatic, expedient, or honest this turn in fact is, remains critical.

For me, no one is so easily reduced, so easily categorised. Conradie tells me that when a friend looked at an artwork he’d made, he ‘didn’t know what to feel’. It is this loss of focus, this incapacity to orientate oneself in front of Conradie’s work, that is reassuring. He implicates one in a zone, then refuses its resolution. His works are not made, but unmade. They hover between sense and senselessness. He refuses the obsession with resolution, be it aesthetic or ideological. This is not a conscious act. It is not doubt which the artist seeks to instil. His portraits are not algorithmic: they don’t fit, fix, explain, order. Instead, they exist as oddities in realms obsessed with order and, unsurprisingly, emerge as waste matter, a surplus to presumed need, in the same way in which all that is aged is sickeningly regarded as surplus. He gives us what we don’t want or care for. If this decision is canny, and provocatively so, at no point is this choice ever remarked upon. Instead, Conradie implicates us in the cruel hypocrisy of our time.

Mexico City, Mexico 2017

His struggle is focused on two distinct optics: the human body, and its fragility. What matters is matter — flesh, bone, muscle — and the other dimension, dimensionless, that makes us human. His quest, through portraiture, is to hold fast to the intangible within the tangible. It is too easy to assume him a surrealist — someone who coasts the surface of reality — but his pictures of an alternative or metaphysical reality, while literally expressed, are never simply thus. Human embodiment is his anchor; the ground from which he departs into the groundless. Nothing in his world is possible without the bodies’ primacy, that is, the body felt, touched, painted. If the human head is the defining motif-factorcondition for the painting, its substance is only realisable when, in the aftermath of the painting of flesh-bone-muscle, one arrives upon its tenuousness-fragility-complexity.

Conradie loves the aged body, primarily male. Some are family members, others not. He does not see the being as he/she imagines themselves to be, but what that body generates. We all generate. Self-possession is a fantasy. As is self-aggrandising portraiture. Conradie does nothing of the sort. Instead, he shifts the yearning intrinsic in a body. He asks what it is, not what it claims itself to be. That he does so without an echo chamber, without permitting himself the fantasy that he knows the consciousness of his subject, is remarkable. In short, Conradie has given up the ghost, centuries in the making, that he, the painter, knows his subject. Instead, what we get is a rune, an oddity, a figure in situ whose consequence is irreducible to their consciousness, or the artist’s projection thereof. Instead, it is doubt — the subject’s, the artist’s — which outweighs the Kantian fantasy, ‘Know Thyself’.

In an age as declamatory as ours, in which there is little room for human complexity, it is vital that we recognise the criticality of doubt. Christiaan Conradie is primarily a painter who works in mixed media, someone who believes in the potency of the human form and the struggles which incur in its impossible making. No surety exists in a likeness. Especially for someone who chooses to paint the impossibility thereof. No one looks in the way they expect themselves to. Ever. Rather, we are bludgeoned by time’s refusal to subject itself to our demands. Old bodies don’t care for young ideas, they say. And yet this is what Conradie has chosen to do — to embrace the aged and make them anew. He does not consecrate age but enlivens an impasse, opens up a possibility, recreates an impossible condition.

We will laugh with our heads in the sand

Mixed media on paper 50cm x 35cm 2021

This is an astonishing enterprise. Why would one do such a thing? And can you recall when last it was undertaken? I can’t. In the much-revered works by Lucien Freud, morbidity clings. In the paintings by Jenny Saville one finds grotesquerie. Both enshrine a reality principle devoid of love and care. Conradie is another matter entirely. He breaks away from the fetish of age, altering why and how we look at older humans. He shape-shifts what older people are. How so? Because he does not merely look at them; because inwardly, he sees himself; and because he knows that no one, no human, is ever the sum of their inhered or apparent condition. Agism is a folly, tiredness perpetual for anyone. So what does he do? He mixes it up. In a Conradie painting, worlds and cultures are superimposed. The artist positions us in an unresolvable splice between the real and imagined, traditional and modern. After T.S. Eliot, he reminds us that all time is contained within an unredeemable present, in which rest or composure is an impertinence. This makes for painting as a peculiar act of faith. The questions Conradie raises are age-old and current: Is it possible to paint the soul? Is it possible, after Da Vinci, to conceive of ‘divinity incarnate’? Are portraits only ever representations of a limit? Where, in the moment of apprehension, does the experience lie — in the work, one’s relation to it, or the sedimented opinions which reaffirm it? If we persist in the belief that we can paint the soul, we are also reminded that we cannot. Snagged between faith, reason, and feeling, we doubt ourselves, hedge our bets, or plunge deeply into the arrogation that is intuition — Colbert’s ‘truthiness’. For today, in this historical moment, we either err on the side of faith or doubt, while knowing that neither is wholly ours. We remain anxious.

Jill’s

It is heartening, however, to learn that anxiety — the defining condition of our age — is not necessarily a bad thing. ‘Anxiety is not merely a problem or an affliction for which philosophy offers a solution,’ notes Samir Chopra. Rather, ‘anxiety and philosophy are intimately related because inquiry — the asking of questions, the seeking to dispel uncertainty — is how humans respond to this philosophical anxiety’. The mind is an integral part of the whole. We cannot live without anxiety, but neither do we live because of it. Despite being pricked and probed by matters great and small — do I dare to eat a peach? — we venture onward. We may hold fast to a ‘desire to know’ or presume this to be the fundament of human ‘nature’, but as Chopra reassures us, a ‘philosophical being’ is an ‘anxious being’. Anxiety, he continues, ‘is an essential human disposition that leads us to enquire into the great, unsolvable mysteries that confront us’ — Is it possible to paint the soul?

Rooted in anxiety, this reflection examines portraiture as a symptom thereof. My argument is that, irrespective of its roots in religion or secularism, portraiture has never triumphed over anxiety. It cannot, because no rendition of a face ever attains to an absolute truth, not even Da Vinci’s painting of Christ. Mystique is a by-product of projection, be it mythic, divinatory, or phenomenological. It is within this conundrum that I position Conradie’s unique and utterly contemporary wager — the irredeemable present that defines their expression. He is not enthralled by masks or essences, nor does he dispute the veracity of either proposition. Instead, Conradie steps outside of the complex which exercises, haunts, and confounds us. If he believes in neither the inner life of a painted face nor its impossibility, then what, if anything, does he adhere to?

Is there a shaping ground in his portraits?

It’s hard to tell. His faces and bodies are certainly present. They are meticulously and solidly crafted choreographies of flesh, blood, and bone. Yet Conradie does not believe that he has represented or evoked a being. His portraits are not proven records of lives lived. They do not tell us the truth of the being, but neither do they dispute this possibility. Why? Because Conradie understands the health of anxiety — the desire to know what we cannot.

Here Collings returns. For him, ‘the inner life of painting’ is distinguished from both the subject matter and the artist’s biography. The use of a painting has ‘to do with its identity as a painting, and not the surrogate it offers through imagery, history, documentation and recording and so on’. Provenance plays no part; only the authority of painting holds sway. This is a radical modernist view which stands at odds with the values of the past and present. As I’ve noted, portraiture was always commemorative. Its purpose, whether religious or secular, is to maintain a specifically cultural economy of power. Conradie refuses this economy. He does not wholly endorse the distinctions Collings sets up, but neither is he averse to their cogency. Instead he occupies a liminal world, incapable of overcoming a constitutive anxiety or doubt. Is it possible to disentangle the matter of paint from its embodied content? Surely not. And yet Collings has a point. We often forget to engage with matter as matter. In the case of portraiture, this is concernedly the case, because what immediately enthrals us is a painting’s metaphoric power — the vision it dissimulates as it conceals the processes involved in achieving a likeness. However, in Conradie’s paintings we encounter a hiccup.

In the arms of sleep

Oil on canvas 195cm x 163cm 2018

He provides a mirror, but he also tampers with it. Two distinct techniques recur, realism and expressionism. The first is mimetic, devoted to transparency. The second is concerned with the materiality of paint. It is this double-bind which unsettles the viewer. Conradie amplifies a tension between painterly techniques and human vision.

He has spent many years mastering realistic portraiture, depth of field across a flat plane. But he has also found himself refusing the ruses of a flattening transparency. Why?

As I’ve noted, the answer lies in the artist’s reliance upon a productive anxiety. He cannot know himself or the world, and because he sees painting as both propositional and intuitive, finds himself caught between the shifting tectonic plates of realism and expressionism. It is vital to note that realism, a putatively objective record of a perceived world, is no truer than subjective and formal experimentation. In this regard, Collings’ view that the importance of a painting depends, primarily, upon its ‘identity as a painting and not the surrogate it offers through imagery’ is crucial. Conradie mashes contrasting traditions, but he does not confuse them. His figures are realistic, their contexts less so. The environments his figures occupy are, in part, inspired by Anselm Keifer’s thickly-layered miasmic surfaces, the matter of matter, the density and colour of paint. Keifer’s post-war German melancholy, however, is only one ingredient in a greater complex. For if one encounters a northern European melancholia in Conradie’s paintings, one also encounters a southern sunniness. This tension is exemplified by Nietzsche, a selfdescribed ‘hyperborean’ — a northerner in love with the sun. Inspired by Pindar, Nietzsche tells us that ‘beyond the north, ice, and death’ lies life, our happiness. While Conradie is southern born, and therefore Nietzsche’s sensibility in reverse — a man of heat enthralled by the chill of the north, an Africa child born of a European diaspora — he nevertheless expresses a comparable tension. His artistic influences, after all, are indebted to European portraiture. His take, however, is peculiarly southern.

By this I do not mean that his paintings are what they are because he self-identifies as an African, but because, like Nietzsche, he understands that he straddles two irreconcilable worlds. A hyperborean person is an anxious person, one who refuses to succumb to custom and is always open to unbidden promise, as inclined to faith as they are to doubt, for whom ripeness is all.

As a consequence, Conradie tells us that while we may be bound to limits, we are also free to overcome them.

Shiny shoes, tie

on paper

His paintings surpass the conditions for their making. If they never quite comport themselves, it is because they are excessive, inclined to overreach. This is because Conradie doubts constraint, prefers accident and surprise. He is fascinated by the liquidity of things. We see a man waist deep, divided between a roiling red flood and a placid pale green sky. He is tethered to both worlds, the one temperate, the other intemperate. The scatterings of a red torrent fall from his animated elbows, the bearded head is lifted upwards. A striped ginger cat nestles on his shoulder. His familiar? Companion? What are we to make of this scene? To my mind it captures the prevailing tension in Conradie’s paintings: sea and sky and man between, softness and roughness, the pacific and the wild, north and south. It is in the moment where these worlds converge — always infinitesimally so — that we encounter the painting’s defining moment, distinguished by a productive anxiety, an unwillingness to take sides, a desire to keep everything in play. If Conradie’s distinctive sensibility is hyperborean, it is because reason and knowledge must be given up in the name of an unfathomable grace. The words of Heraclitus are fitting in this regard:

The earth is melted into the sea by that same reckoning whereby the sea sinks into the earth.

An

Plath’s death

on canvas,

Black skies punched holes in our heads - Oil on canvas, 83cm x 110cm, 2017

Division is refused, contraries blurred. The figure between — a portrait of the artist’s father — is a mortal and imaginary plumbline. If Conradie is a white African, he is also, after J.M. Coetzee, not yet African. Profoundly silent, rarely given to opinion, Conradie has never allowed himself to be pinned down. He is not wholly aligned with the world he has inherited. In this regard, he echoes Nietzsche’s unsettled and unresolved desire. It is this irresolution that his paintings manifest. The discordance between realism and expressionism, sobriety and play, calm and intemperance, is the measure of their core dilemma. If his paintings are experiments in portraiture — life-painting, even, and especially when they refuse this sanctified belief — it is because the painter cannot determine the condition for their making. Their indeterminacy give us what we need most in these uncertain times: hesitance, doubt, a profound care and preparedness to confront the unknown. That Conradie predominantly paints older white men may seem at odds with the virtue signalling that abounds today, but this is not, in my view, of any great import. In refusing the predictive iconography of today’s art world, as well as the fetish of the sacramental and morbidity of the secular moments in portraiture, he seeks a creative expression that both absorbs and traduces all of these dimensions. He asks us to reconsider the values we uphold and rethink the rights of the human more inclusively. The world his figures inhabit is singularly his and their own, yet their reach is far greater. They embody Conradie’s story of painting — of time, history, existence, inexistence, immediacy, superannuation. What Conradie tells us is that nothing can ever be so easily disavowed or discarded; that time past and time future exist in an unredeemable present.

Papaloapan

At a r a x i a

by Sven Christian

I’m at home, in bed, reading a book. In it I come across a word, ‘ataraxia,’ which I need to look up. Coined by the Greek skeptic Pyrrho, it’s defined as a ‘state of serene calmness,’ ‘peace and freedom from fear,’ ‘stoical indifference,’ ‘a pleasure that comes when the mind is at rest.’ I’m thinking about this word and I’m thinking about Christiaan Conradie’s paintings, in particular the one of an elderly man, submerged chest-deep in a fathomless expanse of black liquid, his head and shoulders sun-kissed against a warm, pastel sky.

Eyes closed, he looks content, present, perhaps even amused. There is no sign of physical struggle, yet it would be a reach to say that the kind of pleasure which emanates from the painting is that of a mind ‘at rest.’ On the contrary, I am drawn to this word as a descriptor because it sounds pharmaceutical. It is a utopian word, the stuff of real estate brochures and tourist pamphlets. On an aspirational level, the idea of rest as the ultimate end-goal runs deep, but as Simone de Beauvoir — the author of my book — points out, rest can only result in pleasure when it is earned, and it can only be earned through action:

At the side of the sunny road the coolness of the shade is most precious, and a break is relaxing after tiring exercise. From the top of the hill I look at the path travelled, and the entire path is present in the joy of my success. The walk gives the rest its worth, and my thirst gives the glass of water its worth.

Enjoyment, then, is relational. It is not a ‘separation from the world,’ nor is it something that can be limited to the instant:

A pleasure is even more precious if it is newer, if it stands out more intensely against the uniform background of time. But the instant limited to itself is not new; it is only new in relationship with the past. A whole past comes together in the moment of enjoyment. And I don’t just contemplate it. To enjoy a good thing is to use it, to throw oneself with it toward the future.

It is precisely this sense of thick-time that I feel from Conradie’s painting. Not just that of a life lived — embodied in the folds and wrinkles of skin, heavy against a light, flat expanse of sky — but that peculiar mix of pleasure and anxiety derived from his immersion in the unknown. Reflective, impenetrable, the liquid in which he bathes leaves much to the imagination. It reminds me of an oil slick, yet it doesn’t seem sticky enough. Unlike those horrific images of birds trapped in oil’s mucous film, it does not cling to him, and as much as it reminds me of oil it is also oddly spacious, like the darkest of nights, its surface specked with colourful ‘stars’; his own reflection like that of the moon, a ‘line of radiance’ which reaches out ‘across the pathless deep.’

What shall we do with your bones

Oil on canvas 196cm x 133cm

2018

Day and night orbit each other in this image, bridged by a rainbow which is thrown out in an arc over the gravity-bound figure to dangle in front of him like a carrot on a stick. Although this simile lends itself to the Irish pot of gold, the cultural significance of rainbows is deep and varied. The story of Genesis tells that a rainbow appeared after the Great Flood: ‘God’s promise that he would never send another.’ The Nordics saw it as a bridge between the mortal and immortal worlds, crossed only by the gods or those who die in battle. In Australian Aboriginal mythology, the rainbow is a giant serpent — the creator of all life. It inhabits both ground and sky, possessing the power to both nurture and destroy. Buddhism, in turn, regards the rainbow as the penultimate state of nirvāna, which it defines as a ‘release or freedom from suffering’ — a ‘stilling’ of ‘the fires that keep the process of rebirth going.’

All appear relevant within the context of Conradie’s work. Is it a rainbow of promise or impending doom, a portal to the afterlife or a symbol of enlightenment? A youthful counter to his comb-over? Although light, animated, Conradie’s rainbow also bears the weight of a projectile, giving depth to the image. And while the image of a rainbow is consistently evoked in his work, its treatment is almost always different. Whether employed as a projectile, halo, sticker, flag, or badge of honour; whether it takes on an artificial or flesh-like quality, it is the symbolic ambiguity of the rainbow as idea, its abstract ‘out-of-reachness,’ which I am drawn to.

Returning to the Buddhist view of the rainbow as the penultimate state of nirvāna — as a symbol for having arrived at some heightened state of internal/eternal peace — I am intrigued to learn that it is this concept which Pyrrho appropriated for his ‘ataraxia,’ a concept which has subsequently informed much of the Western philosophical tradition. Most notable were the Epicureans, who ‘scorned the pleasure of movement in order to preach only the pleasure of repose, pure ataraxia,’ and the Stoics, who, in renouncing the body in favour of a ‘pure interiority,’ sought to develop something of a hardened exoskeleton, becoming ‘but a naked presence that even pain cannot touch.’

If indifference to the external/bodily world is something to be desired, it owes much to Descartes’ ‘I think, therefore I am’ — a claim which Milan Kundera wryly notes is ‘the statement of an intellectual who underrates toothaches.’ ‘Many people, few ideas’ he adds, proposing ‘I feel, therefore I am’ as an appropriate substitute. ‘When someone steps on my foot, only I feel the pain ... In intense suffering the world disappears and each of us is alone with his self.’

Like a river to a storm

Oil on paper 35cm x 50cm 2021

Kundera’s description of intense suffering as a distinctly solitary experience — as the brutal basis for selfawareness — seems apposite to De Beauvoir’s understanding of enjoyment as something that is relational. Thus, the question for me is how mutually dependant these states are. Can one suffer without ever having experienced joy? Can one experience joy without knowing what it means to suffer? ‘All the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber,’ wrote Pascal, a statement which is equally true of happiness. For De Beauvoir, however, the crux is that nobody can remain indefinitely in their own chamber, noting that:

[Man] is constitutively oriented toward something other than himself ... The man lying in the shade at the top of the hill is not only there, on that piece of earth that his body embraces. He is present to those hills that he perceives. He is also in the faraway cities, as someone who is absent. He rejoices in this absence. Even if he closes his eyes and tries to think about nothing, he feels like himself in contrast with the background of immobile and unconscious heat in which he bathes. He cannot suddenly spring forth into the world in the pure ipseity [selfness] of his being without the world suddenly springing forth in front of him.

Despite attempts to the contrary, we cannot escape the world in which we live. And it is here, I think, that ataraxia falls short as a descriptor for the kind of pleasure which emanates from Conradie’s work, because while his solitary figure may occupy a space between — his own ‘chamber’ — he is not indifferent to his surrounds. Even within his chamber, he is immersed in a world outside of himself, his whole being orientated toward something other than himself.

It is perhaps for this reason that although Conradie’s painting can be regarded as representational of an internal mental state, one cannot discount that it also leans heavily on the senses; on our imaginative capacity to feel what he feels. To enjoy the painting I must step outside of myself, immerse myself in it. I must meet the painting halfway. Thus, De Beauvoir writes, ‘There is no enjoyment except when I leave myself and engage my being in the world through the object that I am enjoying.’ Similarly, Kundera writes that there is no happiness in living, in ‘carrying one’s painful self through the world,’ but that happiness can only be found in being, in ‘becoming a fountain, a fountain on which the universe falls like rain.’

I’ve been hit by cherry blossoms and roses too Oil on canvas 200cm x 140cm 2017

It is an apt description for a number of Conradie’s paintings, in which a wispy caricature of a cloud, an artificial bouquet of flowers, or a gestural swathe of blue paint rain down on the paintings’ occupants. Like those solitary clouds that follow people around in cartoons, they are specific to them, to their mood. Life, death, promise, peace, and dread come together in that mid-air melt of light and liquid, and it is this strange economy of sustenance, sufferance, and satisfaction that I find so present in Conradie’s paintings, most strikingly, in his ability to keep all of these elements in play.

A feast of many courses:

In her essay Labor, Work, Action (1964), Hannah Arendt extends De Beauvoir’s observation about rest/pleasure to the concept of labour, noting that ‘effort and gratification follow each other as closely as producing and consuming, so that happiness is a concomitant of the process itself.’ She draws an important distinction between labour and work, defining the former as a bodily activity which administers ‘to the needs of life.’ Thus, one labours to put food on the table or to give birth. In this sense, labour follows ‘the circular movement of our bodily functions.’ It does not come ‘to an end as long as life lasts’ but is ‘endlessly repetitive,’ and since labour ‘corresponds to the condition of life itself, it partakes not only in life’s toil and trouble but also in the sheer bliss with which we can experience our being alive.’

Unlike the perishable products of labour, work produces ‘use-objects,’ durable things which provide some sanctum of stability to the world. In the Marxist sense, the objects produced through work — tools, new technologies — relieve us from the burden of labour, yet as described by Arendt, ‘There is no lasting happiness and contentment for human beings outside the prescribed cycle of painful exhaustion and pleasurable regeneration,’ noting that ‘whatever throws this cycle out of balance’ — be it misery or the boredom of ‘an entirely effortless life’ — ultimately derails the possibility of fulfilment.

In the old house, Mary Mixed media on canvas 128cm x 165cm 2018

These

In We skip by the oceans, we skip by the seas (2017) — originally shown at Galerie 55 Bellechasse, Paris — a sulky, somewhat comical-looking figure dons a crown of bright plastic flowers and fluffy toys, akin perhaps to a dunce cap or an upturned ice-cream cone. Here, however, the flowers and toys are stitched onto the canvas. They are supplementary to the figure, in the sense that they don’t occupy the same field but sit awkwardly atop his head. These are mass-manufactured objects; objects that are meant to withstand the passage of time. That they’re an odd fit somehow aligns with Arendt’s observation that it is the durability of the fabricated world which lends such objects their ‘relative independence’ from humanity, an objectivity through which people, ‘their everchanging nature notwithstanding, can retrieve their identity by being related to the enduring sameness of objects, the same chair today and tomorrow, the same house, at least formerly, from birth to death.’

Thus, a person who holds onto their favourite childhood toy might look at it in awe of the wonder it once elicited, might long for the child they once were. This is quite a different experience to one’s relationship with the natural world, itself in a perpetual state of flux, yet the artificial objects included in Conradie’s paintings are anything but stable. Too much of a good thing, perhaps? As notes De Beauvoir, ‘The sweetest melody, repeated indefinitely, becomes an annoying refrain. The taste at first delicious soon sickens me.’ This is certainly true of The vintage you wore to the feast (2016), in which a saturated figure is force-fed bright neon through tubes, one for the mouth, ear, and eye. It is the kind of image that I associate with excess: with doom scrolling, convenience shopping, work fatigue, and indigestion, with quick-fixes, 24-hour casinos, and bottomless slot machines — the dark flip-side of that perennial pot of gold. For while endlessly repetitive, it is not Arendt’s laborious cycle of effort and gratification — ‘of painful exhaustion and pleasurable regeneration’ — that I feel from this work, but the monotony of ‘an entirely effortless life.’

We skip by the oceans, we skip by the seas

Mixed media on canvas

x 98cm

The forty-three-plus fairs and exhibitions in which Conradie has been involved since 2015 — from London, Paris, Barcelona, Istanbul, and Brussels to New York, San Francisco, Miami, Basel, and Brussels — are testament to the fact that he is no stranger to hard work. This is no small feat, especially when one considers that he’s spent the better half of the past two decades bouncing from one metropole to the next. As described by De Beauvoir, ‘An unchanging enjoyment that stays the same for too long is no longer felt as a plenitude; in the end it merges with a perfect absence.’ This might explain Conradie’s penchant for travel, but I also believe that his prolific output points toward the temperament of someone who is never quite satisfied with the finished ‘product’; someone for whom enjoyment is found in the act:

For enjoyment is the presence of an object to which I feel present. It is presence of the object and of myself in the heart of their difference. But as soon as the object is handed over to me, the difference dissolves. There is no longer an object, but once again a single, empty existence that is but vapidity and ennui. As soon as I eliminate the distance that, in separating me from the object, allows me to throw myself toward it, to be movement and transcendence, this fixed union of the object and me no longer exists except in the way a thing does.

It is this desire — to be present within the heart of difference, ‘to be movement and transcendence’ — that I believe underscores much of Conradie’s work. Consequently, when I talk about the tension inherent in his paintings — the friction generated between elements or the strange economy of sustenance, sufferance, and satisfaction that I find so present — I am not talking about a kind of ‘dramatic tension’ which ‘transforms everything ... merely into steps leading to the final resolution,’ but rather, after Kundera, ‘a feast of many courses.’ And I don’t just contemplate it. ‘To enjoy a good thing is to use it, to throw oneself with it toward the future.’

By the saints that sang this song

Oil on canvas 116cm x 200cm 2021