AVA Gallery
October 24 - November 12, 2005
Cape Town

Adriaan van Zyl - Paintings
by Claire Wolf Krantz

In his recent paintings, Adriaan van Zyl deviates from his earlier fascination with a South African landscape that is seemingly devoid of people. At the AVA gallery he now introduces a complex urban setting: paintings of the Tygerberg Hospital complex. His works are highly realistic, yet they differ from the photographs he uses as source material by means of their evocative color relationships and carefully worked surfaces. Tygerberg Hospital not a fancy, private hospital. It is huge, all business, spare, and industrial looking. Although this setting does not convey comfort, it does express substantiality, seriousness, and capability. Van Zyl shot his photographs here before and during his hospitalization and recovery from a serious illness.

A favorite painting is Hospital Triptych (2004), in which he depicts the brownish orange brick buildings of the Tygerberg complex. The left and right sides of this triptych are views of the buildings from different places: The right-hand picture is of one massive block of buildings with several courtyards. Crossing in front of them is a walkway, presumably leading to even more impersonal, impenetrable structures. The left side is a long shot shown in sharp perspective. The roof of a lower, adjacent building and the two floors above can be seen receding into the distance. Offsetting this massive complex, van Zyl’s hospital room can be seen in the center section. Dominated by the bed, it is painted predominantly in blue-greens - the color generally associated with hospitals and surgery - and counterbalances the browns and oranges of the buildings’ exteriors.

Replacing the paintings of flowers, fruit, and dead birds ordinarily associated with still lifes, other current paintings such as Hospital Still Life 1 and Theatre Still Life 2 depict, as still life, the cold reality of the instruments used for diagnosis and treatment, themselves often deadly in the pain they produce. The cabinets in which they are housed as well as the objects that the patient can see before surgery are painted from odd angles, with cold, hard precision. Van Zyl’s streamlined furniture, his privacy curtain - all the accoutrements of a typical, no-frills hospital - are lethal. His paintings of these objects in the hospital setting are beautiful, but the objects and scenes he paints are disturbing.

Works such as The Recovery Room and Hospital Arrival show beds or carts that are spare and unwelcoming. Yet in others, van Zyl’s diptychs and triptychs juxtapose images of his hospital bed with those of the ocean. Hospital Diptych, for example, portrays his room, tranquil and orderly, next to a raging sea. In this work, van Zyl seems to suggest that while his environment and persona are calm and workmanlike, his inner reality is in uproar.
 In the left-hand panel of The Night Before, van Zyl painted his room in darkness. Next to it, the right hand panel of an orange sun setting over a city is probably the view from his hospital room. While the gloomy dimness of these images imply the approach of night, suggesting the end of day - or of life, there are small spots of light and hope pictured by the lamp shining over the bed on the left, and the remainders of the sun reflecting off the window sill of his room on the right.

In these hospital pieces, van Zyl conveys powerful emotions, of the fear and dread associated with serious illness, of being trapped in a large institution, and of feeling invisible in an atmosphere of anonymity. He communicates a powerful sense of the reality of illness, of pain, of helplessness in the face of a large organizational structure. Yet within these desolate structures, these engines of healing, lies salvation, more clearly indicated in other hospital pieces juxtaposing interiors and exteriors of the buildings with the sea. In Hospital Diptych 2, painted in browns and beiges, of a waiting room in the hospital next to a panel showing a more welcoming sea, he reveals mixed emotions. In the dim, unremarkable room on the left, one waits to see what the future holds, while on the right, the surf pounding on the beach elicits a number of interpretations. Here, van Zyl’s notable ambiguity is most evident: what does the sea mean? Freedom? Drowning? Swimming as exercise and recreation? Does nature’s power threaten the efficacy of what these hospital buildings stand for: the most extreme form of human intervention in natural processes? Or is it perhaps an overarching, soothing environment that suggests that life, in all its forms, goes on, a view of nature as enveloping and part of a larger system.

By contrast, in an exhibit of earlier paintings shown at the University of Stellenbosch Art Gallery, (“Travelogue 2002-2004,”) semi-arid landscapes prevail. They are quiet and desolate; their tone generated by an absence of people and by van Zyl’s signature muted shades of brown, beige, and blue. Yet these paintings are not depressing.

Although similar in atmosphere to the emptiness of a Hopper painting, van Zyl’s works differ from Hopper’s in his palpable attraction to, and investment in, his chosen places. His works are highly realistic, yet they differ from his photographic basis by means of their evocative color relationships and carefully worked surfaces. Although they are very beautiful, they are unlike stereotypical South African landscapes of mountains and seas, or picturesque portrayals of animals or small towns. Instead, they address the gritty side of this country’s story – the prosaic factories and mines in which the country’s wealth is produced: the houses and towns in which ordinary people live, the dams and lighthouses and wharves that are the backbone of shipping and farming. His paintings generally contain evidence of both life and death, of the land and the built environment, of structures that are either fallen into disrepair or are temporarily uninhabited.

His paintings of the homes and churches in towns are often oddly framed; for instance, van Zyl isolated the rooftops and church steeple in Luderitz 1,(2002) squeezing the buildings between a background of the sea and a rocky foreground. Similarly, mines, lighthouses, bridges and beached boats often include sections of naked rock or stony shore, a cold uninviting sea, or dirty, hard packed sand.  Other paintings depict dams and reservoirs - they are dense, geometric structures, isolated and oddly out of place. Karoo Dam (2000) is an exceptionally beautiful example. In front of two hills sits a round, grooved, concrete structure, plopped in the brush and low scrub of the Karoo. It is huge - measured by its proximate trees, the tops can only peek over the edge. These paintings exude a stillness and a sense of restrained emotion that contribute to their understated power. As in all of his works, Van Zyl leaves out as much as he includes, thereby opening the paintings up to questions as well as answers.

Other works, painted from photographs taken in Namibia, are particularly interesting. This is desert, far more arid country than in the Karoo or van Zyl’s birthplace on the West Coast. But rather than repeating the beautiful images of sand filling abandoned homes that are so typically portrayed as Namibian landscape, van Zyl painted abandoned industrial structures that are still standing, the worse for wear and weather - a much tougher view of the desert’s inhospitality. In Kolmanskop 2, (2003) two oblong, abandoned buildings stand on a shallow sand dune littered with rocks and a desiccated bush. On the right we see what looks like the bottom half of a tower; on the left, a shed. Both are windowless and doorless, empty. The space beyond the dune is mysterious - clouds and water come to mind, but a sea-like expanse of the desert could also lie in the distance. I wouldn’t like to live in van Zyl’s Namibia – perhaps only pass through quickly. But I would want to know why these buildings, these towns, were built in such an uninhabitable place – what brought people there, and why they left.

In another series of paintings, van Zyl depicted tombstones scattered in arid graveyards dotted with sparse foliage on which commemorative objects typical of the Karoo and West Coast are often placed. The surrounding earth’s combination of aridity and foliage is itself a comparison between life and death. Additionally, these paintings are meditations on the connections between past and present and on the human presence as it marks the earth. Rather than being a yearning for the past, they initiate our reflections on eternity, a stance pertinent to people as they age, grapple with serious illness, or experience the loss of loved ones.

Van Zyl’s paintings of South African places derive their authenticity and authority from his familial embeddedness in the country. It is his home, his ancestors having lived here for hundreds of years. His is a lived relationship to a functioning country rather than one of touristic encounters. It is true that Africa’s indigenous people are black, but White South Africans also have a history and a place in this country, no less than in the more recent history of the United States, where immigrants and their children are considered as American. Our identities are all formed from a heterogeneous past as well as an evolving present.

Unlike other painters, who understand themselves through a comparison with others, van Zyl paints aspects of himself by means of painting his environment. Although his paintings reflect restrained, but unmistakable passion, Van Zyl doesn’t paint his feelings directly – he paints what attracts his eye and the emotions and experiences that lie behind. He offers the viewer a process of discovery, an examination of what exists in his surroundings, in particular times and places. This commitment to looking is part of what makes his small, unassuming paintings such a source of continuing engagement for those who have the interest and ability to also look at what van Zyl sees.

These works can also be seen on van Zyl’s Web site: www.adriaanvanzyl.co.za.

Claire Wolf Krantz is an artist, freelance critic, and guest curator.
As an artist she works in a combination of painting and photography as well as digitally created images.