AGAINST THE DYING OF THE LIGHT Cedric Vanderlinden
AGAINST THE DYING OF THE LIGHT Cedric Vanderlinden www.cedricvanderlinden.co.za www.facebook.com/cedricv.anderlinden.92 @The_Art_Hammer cedricv@iafrica.com +27 82 887 1612
Artist Statement I am the result of a bad joke: “Turner, Rothko, and Magritte walk into a bar…” In our lives, we encounter moments of absolute isolation and deep silence. In those moments, if we are equipped with a modicum of introspection, we are confronted with the Cosmos and, more importantly, our utter insignificance in the face of it. Questions of ‘why are we here?’ and ‘what does it all mean?’ become nonsense: the terrifying magnitude and endless power of the Cosmos simply overwhelm and devour. It is a confrontation with something bigger than death: it is the end of meaning. It erases all our actions, all our dreams, and noble and base passions. All that remains in the end is Goya’s Saturn endlessly devouring until he, himself, is devoured until all traces are annihilated. It is the Gothic and Romantic Sublime but without the subsequent elevation. It is terror and madness without respite. And it is no wonder we do anything and everything to pretend it is not there. We consume. We fill our lives with noise and light and things. Facebook and YouTube are only the latest manifestation of the primordial urge to keep away the endless dark. We consume. We fill our homes and live with the latest, the brightest, and the most modern. We consume noise and images. We consume drugs and religion and patriotism alike, anything to give our lives a semblance of order, meaning and purpose. Maybe then, we can transcend the yawning void. It is, therefore, with no little irony that our society, built as it is to consume and consume (more and more to somehow keep the Cosmos at bay), has engendered its own end, and the end of all to which we ascribe meaning. The will to alter our mad race does not exist. Or, rather, it exists, but only by those who have confronted the Devouring Cosmos and have chosen to fight at Ragnarok, like the Norse of Old, not because they will win, but because dying fighting, as Dylan Thomas reminds us, is the only way. Unfortunately, those are few and far between, and not nearly enough to change our need to distract and consume. The result is a global environmental catastrophe. It is here. It is too late. And it brings with it the Eternal Void. Art is the result of this personal confrontation with the Immortal Chaos. Art arises out of isolation, silence, and solitude. It emerges simply to bear witness. We see it in the eyes of Rembrandt or the colour fields of Newman. Everywhere you look, from Tapies to Rothko and Turner, there are the remains of a deep, honest, simple introspection and defiance. Art is the opposite of consumption. Art is a witness.
Against the Dying of the Light (2018) Oil paints on Board | (W)80 cm x (H)60 cm | 750,00 € “What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?” - Henry David Thoreau
Against the Sky (2018) Oil paints on Board | (W)30 cm x (H)35 cm | 400,00 € “It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone.” - John Steinbeck
At the End (2018) Oil paints on Board | (W)60 cm x (H)80 cm | 750,00 € “There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it’s not really there.” - Bill McKibben
Equilibrium (2018) Oil paints on Board | (W)30 cm x (H)35 cm | 400,00 € “Despite your best efforts, people are going to be hurt when it’s time for them to be hurt.” - Haruki Murakami
Fire From the Sky (2018) Oil paints on Board | (W)30 cm x (H)35 cm | 400,00 € “And the first Angel sounded the trumpet. And there came hail and fire, mixed with blood; and it was cast down upon the earth.” - The Bible
I Bring the Sword (2018) Oil paints on Board | (W)30 cm x (H)35 cm | 400,00 € “Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.” - Arthur Schopenhauer
Operation Castel-Koon 24604 (2018) Oil paints on Board | (W)76 cm x (H)102 cm | 500,00 €
Over a Barren Land (2018) Oil paints on Board | (W)35 cm x (H)30 cm | 400,00 € “You can’t go home again” - Thomas Wolfe
Poison (2018) Oil paints on Board | (W)30 cm x (H)35 cm | 400,00 € “Nothing enhances pleasures and blocks guilt like a looming cataclysm.” - Aleksandar Hemon
Power Out (2018) Oil paints on Board | (W)60 cm x (H)80 cm | 750,00 € “Normal human activity is worse for nature than the greatest nuclear accident in history.” - Martin Cruz Smith
Reaching Out Too Late (2018) Oil paints on Board | (W)60 cm x (H)80 cm | 750,00 € “You wouldn’t think you could kill an ocean, would you? But we’ll do it one day. That’s how negligent we are.” - Ian Rankin
Rising Heat and Setting Suns (2018) Oil paints on Board | (W)60 cm x (H)80 cm | 750,00 € “Why be timid. Death is coming.” - Simon Amstell
Silent Witness (2018) Oil paints on Board | (W)23 cm x (H)31 cm | 400,00 € “Humanity learns true lessons only in cataclysm.” - Daniel H. Wilson
The Last Light (2018) Oil paints on Board | (W)60 cm x (H)80 cm | 750,00 € “Nature shrinks as capital grows. The growth of the market cannot solve the very crisis it creates.” - Vandana Shiva
The Sky has Judged You (2018) Oil paints on Board | (W)30 cm x (H)35 cm | 400,00 € “The past was erased. The erasure forgotten. The lie became the truth.” - George Orwell
Too Far to Save Us (2018) Oil paints on Board | (W)60 cm x (H)80 cm | 750,00 € “We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.” - Ursula K. Le Guin
Too Poor for Shelter (2018) Oil paints on Board | (W)80 cm x (H)60 cm | 750,00 € “People ‘over-produce’ pollution because they are not paying for the costs of dealing with it.” - Ha-Joon Chang
What We Lost (2018) Oil paints on Board | (W)60 cm x (H)80 cm | 750,00 € “Having a conscience now is a grief-soaked proposition” - Stephen Jenkinson
When All You Taste Is Ash (2018) Oil paints on Board | (W)60 cm x (H)80 cm | 750,00 € “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” - Aldo Leopold
Where We Used to Play (2018) Oil paints on Board | (W)60 cm x (H)80 cm | 750,00 € “All the sweet words, and touches and care/tore in the darkness /in disrepair.” - Mia de Jager
Review
Johan Myburg (Excerpt) - June 2016
In the genre of landscape painting, the landscape is traditionally presented as an image of stability, of permanence in a fleeting world – a notion purported by the 18th century’s invention of the topographical print, depicting more or less accurately a “real view” to the extent of portraying an objective reality. Principally derived from Newtonian physics of the time linear notions of causality informed human understanding and translated landscape into a manifestation of the sublime. The unravelling of this Romantic ideal came with the realisation that understanding is determined and restrained by the receiving context for the event, that is, by the network of premises and presuppositions that constitute presentations of the world. An exhibition presented as Landscape can therefore hardly offer the viewer any real view of the world, of landscapes, of places or of topographical memories. We are dealing with perceptions mediated by the nervous system but also by means of social and/or societal interaction. What we think we perceive is not there. What is “out there” is in fact “in here”. The landscapes presented in this exhibition are the perceived realities of three artists; and readings of their paintings are in turn our interpretations, informed by our own social interactions. In Something Left to Save Cedric Vanderlinden presents large-format skyscapes to reflect on the landscape – in most cases an absent landscape. Vanderlinden’s paintings prove to be the opposite of the traditional landscape as an image of stability and permanence in a fleeting world. In We Don’t Belong Here, one of a handful of paintings with a substantial landscape below an overpowering sky, the sense of impermanence becomes tangible. The motto by American author Neil Strauss supports this sense of instability: “Our society, which seems so sturdily built out of concrete and custom, is just a temporary resting place, a hotel our civilization checked into a couple hundred years ago and must one day check out of.” The viewer becomes the witness of a barren Goyaesque landscape dwarfed by an ominous looking sky filled with smoke rather than rain clouds. In spite of the façade of tranquillity exuded by the paintings, a lingering dystopian quality prevails. It manifests in traces of an untenable lifestyle (Where Will You Be When the Light Dies), of disillusionment with consumerism (Remember When This Was Fun, with the faded M of a fast-food franchise vaguely visible) and premonitions of a cataclysmic event (Ash and Shadow and It Ends with Fire). Even in renditions where the sky is crisp and bright (The Dead Will Keep the World) the darker periphery is creeping in. Land is portrayed as the sublime without the subsequent elevation or elation, without safety (Safe as Houses), without arable land (Point of Contact) or without clear thinking (For a Slice of the African Pie). The beauty and strength of Vanderlinden’s paintings lie in his gentle dance with ambiguity: In the hope that in this consumed world there might be “something left to save” he seems to “rage, rage against the dying of the light”. Although the landscape features as the starting point in Vanderlinden’s Landscape the focus is less on the landscape “out there” as an attempt to depict a “real view” to the extent of portraying an objective reality. His work in this exhibition is far more concerned with the interpreted landscape, the landscape “in here”, in the overtly subjective rendering of an internalised landscape – with individualised commentary. Although Vanderlinden highlight’s different aspects concerning the landscape, he speaks in a visual language that contributes significantly to the developing genre known as South African landscape painting.
Qualifications: National Diploma: Fine Arts B-Tech: Fine Arts Painting M-Tech: Fine Arts Painting
Port Elizabeth Technikon Port Elizabeth Technikon Nelson Mandela University
1994 1996 2013
PE Technikon King George VI Gallery Grahamstown Arts Festival Grahamstown Arts Festival Port Elizabeth Monique Besson Private Showing Robyn Fuller Gallery Grahamstown Arts Festival Grahamstown Arts Festival Ruwach Art Gallery, Port Elizabeth Underculture Contemporary Athenaeum ART Event Award Recipient Port Elizabeth, Bloemfontein Art on Target Underculture Contemporary Underculture Contemporary Gallery in the Yard Gallery in the Yard Art It Is Carinus Center, Grahamstown Art It Is Alex Hamilton Gallery Nelson Mandela Metro Art Museum Moor Gallery Underculture Contemporary Grande Provence
1994 1995 1996 – 1998 2001 2004 2003 2004 – 2007 2006 2009 2010 2013 2014 2014 2015 2014 – 2015 2015 2016 2016 2016 2016 2016 2016 2016 2016 2017 2017 2017
Brussels Knysna Arts Festival ArtEc Grahamstown Arts Festival Grahamstown Arts Festival Henry George Gallery Grahamstown Arts Festival Joburg Fringe
1997 2002 2011 2015 2016 2017 2017 2017
Group Exhibitions: Student Exhibition Honours Exhibition GAP Group Exhibition Tuesday Guild PE Academy of Arts Showcase Group Exhibition For Play ii Masters Final Exhibition Wish You Were Here Here Be Dragons Spring Show FODDER 18+SNLV Material(i)sation Manuscript Oil on Canvas Carinus Art Auction The Art of Appreciation Sex and Death Just Painting Exhibition UNTITLED Modern Miniatures Painterly
Solo Exhibitions: Private Exhibition Artist in Residence Where the Ocean Ends Landscapes of Consequence Something Left to Save Immaterium
Cedric Vanderlinden www.cedricvanderlinden.co.za www.facebook.com/cedricv.anderlinden.92 @The_Art_Hammer cedricv@iafrica.com +27 82 887 1612