This year's Sanlam Portrait Award competition, the second, received 809 entries. For the first, in 2013, there were nearly 1,800 entries, but this time organisers insisted that the artists work from life, or at very least their own photographs. It's a deliberately limiting move, but brings a certain immediacy to the 40 finalists on display at the Sanlam Art Lounge (the first corporate gallery in Sandton to open to the public).I found the idea that over the past year or so, more than 800 people had taken the time to paint the kind of detailed portraits you see on this exhibition astounding. That's a lot of human effort devoted to concentrated looking at other people. And the competition entries must represent a fraction of those painted.The majority of the finalists represent fairly traditional portraits: oil paints, head-and-shoulders, eye contact, the rule of thirds. There are one or two that play with slightly unorthodox materials - there's one painted with oil on a copper plate. But as an exhibition, it's hardly preoccupied with questioning the conventions of portraiture. Besides, the persistent popularity of portraiture, after weathering the storms of the 20th century's various art revolutions, suggests that such questions can be justifiably set aside in an exhibition like this.That might seem like disregard for the changing ways in which we understand identity now - and the important questions that have been raised about the claptrap of romantic individualism and personal essences. But then again, the best art always transcends the limitations of its conventions.Of course, some of the portraits in the exhibition fall into the usual traps. They can seem presumptuous or patronising in the way they might fail in their attempts to dignify, say, people who have had lives of hard labour or poverty, and end up romanticising them instead. Some simply get blinded by handsomeness or beauty.But some have magic - the sense that something of the sitter has snuck into the portrait. And we think we can recognise it when a portrait has this quality even if we've never set eyes on the sitter.Perhaps what that means is that we recognise a particular way of looking in certain portraits. It's a kind of intense looking that is not only about seeing - truly seeing - a person, but is also an attempt to hold him or her with a look; not let them go. Yet successful portraits also carry the strange reminder that what is there in the portrait is ultimately also not there: the person represented.It's refreshing and powerful and poignant to engage in the sustained effort of one person to see another. And the idea of thousands of people attempting to do so each year is uplifting...