'I want to fill people with wonder about the sheer bizarre miracle of being alive'
Mark Read, Everard Read's chairman, a son of the Everard family who founded the gallery in 1912 when Johannesburg was still considered a mining town, sits in a wooden Spanish chair, owned by the gallery.
"This was created circa 1880," he grins, patting the chair's arms. "This kind of temporal broadness is what the new space is about. I always dreamt of being able to make something world-class in Johannesburg.
"Johannesburg deserves something utterly fabulous, but it must have a use."
Read was born into the arts; his passions remain broad and natural: armed with a degree in zoology and archaeology, he enjoys a passionate and committed association with organisations who care about the planet. He is a founding trustee of the Palaeo-Anthropology Scientific Trust, and chairman of the World Wide Fund South Africa.
"I want people to look at this space and go, Gosh, how fabulous this is! I want to fill people with wonder about the sheer bizarre miracle of being alive."
Read's focus for Circa is not just to show art but to be about science also. There are plans to exhibit a slice of the moon here.
"Fossils are being discovered at this moment. In Circa, culture, art and science will interface. It's about sustainability and living within our means."
A brand new gallery in the midst of a major international economic recession? Can this be about living within our means?
"It was conceived when the world was booming," the gallery's curator, Jacques Michau, says, leading the way up the whorl-like skeleton of the new space a couple of weeks before its public launch.
Circa fits under the auspices of Everard Read, but will be run as a separate entity.
"This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to venture into new territory without damaging in any way the integrity of Everard Read," Read wrote in a press release.
As the grande dame of galleries in Johannesburg, Everard Read has earned its solid reputation for showing and handling important figurative art. Circa is about more than this - it is about wild and experimental statements, it is about chutzpah and playfulness and it is about embracing much more than just conventional "domestic"-sized paintings and sculptures.
Read does not ignore the fact that the local art world is changing radically: the closure of Warren Siebrits' gallery (on Jan Smuts Avenue, Johannesburg) in May, and the resignation of Emma Bedford, curator of the Goodman Gallery in Cape Town, seem to be cases in point and not to augur well for the industry.
"Nonsense!" Read says. "Galleries come and go. There is a recession, but if we can't see the light at the end of the tunnel, at least we can see the tunnel."
Circa is designed - by Pierre Swanepoel from Studiomas Architects - to be perspicacious in the needs it fills and sensitive to the world in which it is born.
Over three stories, and clad in anodized aluminium fins, its open patio on the roof enables you to see the city from God's perspective. A ramp wraps it, giving pragmatic but poetic access.
It also comprises a project space on the ground floor. It has vertically sliding walls that have the power to shift the galleries as shows demand.
But it is not just a pretty space. It is designed to be self-servicing with on-site solar voltaic panels giving home-grown electricity, solar-heated water, and a focus on harvesting rain for all but drinking.
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