Art over the centuries has been engaged in exploring and producing beauty, but more recently has had a vexed relationship with that concept. In Daniel Blignaut's latest body of work: “A Conversation with Trees”, his work unabashedly aims to achieve aesthetic beauty by evoking a primal fascination with the allure of gold and the aesthetic pleasure of color, pattern and texture — as evident throughout human visual history. Blignaut's process involves making bold aesthetic statements only to soften them with a multitude of layers, which adds to the eventual complexity of the surface. This has the effect of indicating the passage of time on the canvas itself.

In these latest work, he returns to the subject of trees, which has fascinated him since childhood and occurred in his work since the early eighties. Instead of a representational depiction, Blignaut employs something similar to an Iconographic template to portray their presence, complexity, and majesty. He use trees as a metaphor for the human condition — for instance, the visual measure of the passage of time, the seasonal cycle of death and rebirth, and the diversity of personalities. Daniel Blignaut's work is interested in the physicality of trees, and in the way that time, environment and climate impacts the body to produce an enormous visual variety.

Nathalie Maranda’s creative expression moves beyond the traditional antimony of the figuration-abstraction relation. The representational image is often scarcely outlined, but it moves, falters, flows and melts, finally yielding to the painted surface –a dynamic universe which creates and recreates itself into the occurrence, the shape of meaning, through the residue of sculpting organic matter, a method in continuity with her previous explorations.

And, beyond its aesthetic character, Nathalie Maranda’s work posits a space for meditation and the possibility of an encounter. Not simply an encounter of matter and gesture, but also, and above all, an encounter with the spectator - as observer and actor - self-guided, circulating among the clues offered by the artist; appropriating all the possibilities that pile up, one upon the next, from one work to the next, from gestural accumulation, from surfaces wrought of ochre and brown earth tones; celestial, primordial, blues, reds and yellows; set in motion by the artist’s hand, to come alive on the canvas, to be transformed through our gaze.

Richard Heinsohn began combining gestural abstraction with the appropriation of objects in his paintings years ago as part of an endeavor to fuse aesthetic values with conceptual insights. The gestural approach has evolved immensely over time and has become more of an intuitively generated array of symbols which vary in form and meaning. During this process he incorporate a wide variety of small objects such as paint tubes, old toys and discarded gloves into the thick mix of paint, sand, sawdust and painting medium to the point that they cannot be fully perceived from even several feet away but form a narrative of their own up close. This narrative provides a second stage to the viewing experience, allowing the paintings to communicate complex ideas while remaining abstract.  



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