Chris Soal
Chorus, 2019, Birch wood toothpicks, polyurethane sealant, ripstop industrial fabric and board, 110 x 150 x 25 cm
Never a dull moment, 2019, Birch wood toothpicks, polyurethane sealant, ripstop industrial fabric and board, 108 x 130 x 20 cm
Lament (We thought the good times would never end), 2019, Birch wood toothpicks, polyurethane sealant, ripstop industrial fabric and board, 170 x 230 x 60 cm
The sharp edge of comfort, 2019 Birch wood toothpicks, polyurethane sealant and ripstop industrial fabric 190 x 140 x 7 cm
The Fourth Circle (The demise of Frank Lucas), 2019, Burnt and unburnt birch wood toothpicks, polyurethane sealant, ripstop industrial fabric and board, 190 x 145 x 30 cm
Veneration, 2019, Birchwood toothpicks, polyurethane sealant, ripstop industrial fabric and board, 90 x 150 x 20 cm
Devotion (Ma’donna and child), 2019, Used beer bottle-tops threaded onto woven steel rope, MDF, polyurethane sealant, 110 x 190 cm
Genesis, 2019, Used beer bottle-tops threaded onto woven steel rope, MDF, polyurethane sealant, 120 x 170 cm
Fable (A question of nature. A question of culture), 2019, Discarded beer bottle-tops threaded on woven steel rope, burnt and unburnt Birch wood toothpicks, polyurethane sealant, Fibreglass and MDF board, 150 x 190 x 25 cm
All we have and have forgotten to hold, 2019 Discarded beer bottle tops threaded onto woven steel rope, burnt and unburnt birch wood toothpicks, polyurethane sealant, board and ripstop fabric 170 x 88 x 22 cm
Chris Soal Artist As Empath Ashraf Jamal Some artists leave one cold, not matter how conceptually impressive or technically skilled the work. Others – like Chris Soal – electrify the senses and stir the heart. For what one experiences before a work by Soal is best described by Nietzsche as ‘a physiological thought’ – a feeling in the mind which courses through the entirety of a body. That the artist’s surname inescapably directs us to a human being’s most mysterious dimension – the soul – cannot be ignored. It is this mysterious element, said to give humanity its singularity within the greater chain of being, which Chris Soal has made the measure of his work and our understanding thereof. For the great Mexican director, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, the soul weighs 21 grams. It is this weight which leaves the body after death. And it is this infinitesimal number which gives us our humanity. As to whether Inarritu’s calculation is correct is immaterial. What matters, is how one understands this elemental constituent as the defining measure of Chris Soal’s work. How does he generate this intuitive sense in us of a greater being? For while there is no doubt that his reliefs and free-standing sculptures are sensuous – that they make us feel deeply – there is something else at play, a spirit that courses through the works. Madame Blavatsky springs to mind, for it was she who in the late 19th century proved instrumental in connecting the arts to theosophy, she who, against secularism, asked us to reconsider why it is that we make art. Today, in these increasingly jaded and cynical times, it is this return to theosophy in the arts which is gaining traction. For it is no longer enough to understand art, or to recognise its canonical or monetary value. Today it is becoming increasingly urgent that we recognise art’s greater therapeutic value. After all, as John Armstrong and Alain de Botton remind us in Art as Therapy, ‘the main point of engaging with art is to help us lead better lives – to access better versions of ourselves…. To assist the individual soul in its search for consolation, self-understanding and fulfilment’.
It is this incentive which propels Chris Soal. However, while he might hold fast to this ideal, at no point is his work prescriptively so. Unlike Alain de Botton, Soal is no selfhelp guru. Rather, what he asks of us is that we allow for a deeply personal and deeply private encounter with ourselves, that in this saturated age we maintain a belief in our singularity and our greater human connectedness. Empathy is Soal’s defining quality. He is the artist as Empath. The title of a work made of toothpicks, polystyrene sealant, and Milkwood sums up this drive – ‘Climb into someone else’s skin and walk around in it’. But it was Martin Buber, in I and Thou, who best described this intuitive desire for connection. ‘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 in this man … 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’. It is this temperament, this disposition, which informs not only Soal’s engagement with other human beings, but which also defines his creative process. It is Soal’s intuitive combination of materials, his splicing of the synthetic, man-made, and natural, which affirms the artist’s touch. At no point does he see a work as a ‘detached content’, as an object constructed and appraised at a remove. Rather, Soal’s work attests to ‘the inmost growth of the self’. For him art is an act of seeding that it is fundamentally generative. ‘Industrial debris’, rebar, concrete, steel sheeting, foam board, fluorescent lighting, polyurethane sealant, glue, raw and refined wood, copper wire, used beer bottle tops, woven steel rope, flame, ash, reclaimed stumps from the 2017 Knysna fire, are some of the materials integral to the creation of Soal’s works. The elements may seem random, but it is their complicit folding of one within the other that is most striking. Soal embraces material rather than merely using them, because what I think compels him most is the significance of their embrace. It is the frisson his works generate that matters most. A work entitled ‘You threw sand into the wind and the wind blew it back’ is as much a rub as it is an affront, a reckoning with
thoughtlessness and disregard and the damage that follows as a consequence. Therein we see a landscape – made of toothpicks – arable and scorched. It is the whimsical genuflections of an intangible force – wind – which gives the work its obtuse and twisted visual language. Another work, ‘Speak the truth even if your voice shakes’, evokes a strangely eerie blossoming, for in the clefts of a burnt blue-black tree stump we find clusters of toothpicks. Dying bleached coral springs to mind, and with it a morbid interplay of the living and the dead, a man-made ecological catastrophe which has become unstoppable. But it is against fatality – always – that Soal’s works are pitched. A work entitled ‘The suffocation of safe isolation’ challenges our global era of protectionism, and the fascistic fear of difference which underpins it. If Soal challenges our growing provincialismnativism-tribalism and the xenophobic hatred it feeds, it is because, like Martin Buber, he understands the critical necessity for empathy – a necessity, not a given, which impels him at every turn in his life. For Soal is constitutively an aspirational being – someone who yearns, who gives. Echoing Bono, in a work titled ‘But I still haven’t found what I’m looking for’, Soal reminds us that the quest that binds us is ongoing. A combination of threaded bottle caps and partially scorched toothpicks – suggesting a mange-ridden fox stole – conjures the circulatory and unending nature of thinking and making. Works suddenly halt, they do not end, because life, perpetually under construction, is always peripatetic. We stopstart-shift-twist, our reasoning as inchoate and wild as a wind. We immerse ourselves, become monomaniacal, scratch and prod and break then suture. It is a searching that is also a scorching. A piecing together of a numberless series of broken-fragmentedpartial elements. To what end if not one that, in truth, is endless? Perhaps the most compelling material in Soal’s armoury is the toothpick. A minute sliver of a tool, disposable yet essential, the toothpick is the defining denominator and aggregate in a body of work – spanning 2017 to 2019, and counting – which accounts for Chris Soal’s stratospheric rise in the South African art world. The reworking of this sliver of Birchwood into works monumental in their density and scale, is also fast garnering the attention of collectors and art lovers
worldwide. It is not the illusion which their dense configuration trigger that matters most – everyone who sees these works are immediately reminded of sensuous animal pelts – but what these configurations of tens of thousands of toothpicks imply – the realisation that we, each and every one of us, is a multitude, and that we are indivisible. It is a curious fact that the notion of the individual – a secular 18th century construct – stems from its contrary – the indivisible. The singular, therefore, is embedded in the collective. And it is this paradox which is the mainstay and defining principle of Soal’s work. What passionately interests him is what Buber calls ‘the relation between one and the other, between men’. It is this being-between, this precious and precarious splice, upon which each and every work by Soal pivots. This tension in this yearning, exemplified in E.M. Forster’s memorable phrase in Howards End – Only Connect! – is perfectly distilled in Soal’s masterwork, ‘The embrace across time’. We see two Birch logs which, at their meeting point, are filed down to two toothpicks. A void lingers between the points. The logs are held in place by clasps of concrete. But it is the ‘embrace’, as tender as it is virtual, which is the works core. Art history provides us with innumerable examples of this poignant moment – the longing for touch and its sanctity. Which is why Soal conceives of an embrace ‘across time’. But it is also the darker negation of this possibility which gives the work its unsettling force, because in this tremulous aspirational work we cannot ignore the void which also refuses or defers the connection we desperately long for. Chris Soal’s genius resides in his ability to embrace a difficulty that lies at the heart of longing and hope. At no point however is he ever detached. On the contrary, it is the shiver of a possibility, like the uncanny shift in the direction of wind, which reminds us of our fragility. And it is in that moment that we are warmed, held, gathered up like a sliver of drifting wood in a tender and affirming embrace.
Chris Soal (b. 1994, South Africa) is an award-winning, emerging artist living and practicing in Johannesburg. Using unconventional found objects, such as toothpicks and bottle caps, in conjunction with concrete and other industrial materials, Soal negotiates structural impacts on urban living and reflects on ecological concerns. Soal’s spatial approach to sculpture reveals a sensitivity to texture, light and form, expressed in an abstract minimalist language. While, conceptually, his works refer to the socio-political context of their making, highlighting the histories embedded in the found material, and utilising them in a way that challenges societal assumptions of value. In 2017, Soal graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Fine Arts (Hons) at the
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University of Witwatersrand. He was awarded the PPC Imaginarium Award in 2018, alongside being named the winner of the Sculpture category. He has been awarded residencies by the South African Foundation of Contemporary Art, taking place in Knysna, South Africa, by the RAW Material Company in Dakar, Senegal, and the Residenza Roma by Montoro12 in 2019. He has exhibited in group shows at institutions such as the FRAC MECA, Bordeux (2019), Aeroplastics Contemporary in Brussels (2017), Wits Art Museum (2017) and Stellenbosch University Museum (2018). Most recently his solo, Field of Vision, was held at WHATIFTHEWORLD, Cape Town in 2019. Chris Soal’s work has been included in many notable private and public collections, both locally and internationally.