Art appreciation by app - can it work?

Maybe, says Ashraf Jamal, but the virtual innovation doesn’t come close to the existential force of the works

Located in the Krystal Beach Hotel in Harbour Island, Gordon's Bay, the Ndiza Gallery is certainly an out-of-the ordinary art dealership. As you pass through the hotel foyer the gallery unfolds to your left, while just in front of you a brace of yachts loom beyond a glass-screened deck. In this customised resort culture and conference hub, art unabashedly assumes its role as retail's uber fetishobject.

This business-minded approach to art is underscored by the gallery's core innovation - an app linked to the hotel's digital mainframe which, when connected to one's phone, triggers "a full sensory experience" in which the artist records her art process and virtual artworks "speak" in turn.

Because of course in today's world nothing touches us that has not already been mediated.

But how can such an app inspire the purchase of an artwork when we can't really feel it, closely examine its grain, decipher the artist's mood in a stroke of a brush?

It seems such an app works best when reputation precedes the artist, so while there was much brouhaha regarding the app as a "first in Africa" in the gallery context, it was the works themselves that counted.

And as mixed-media works, Arlene Amaler-Raviv's are strictly analogue in nature; the "immersive" space they generate more existential than virtual.

As the artist's catalogue essay, "the voice of a citizen", reads: "Paint becomes the visceral juice from the heart-hand connection. The heart feels and like a seismograph, the hand records." Then again: "Like the rolled-up bedding of a refugee, some canvases accompany the artist from studio to studio". Emotional and itinerant, Amaler-Raviv's paintings capture our acute sense of displacement, our sense of not quite belonging anywhere in particular - which makes a hotel foyer, a thoroughfare, an all the more appropriate location in which to showcase artworks at once embodied yet disembodied, in situ yet adrift.

Amaler-Raviv is no indolent tourist, but a creature haunted by "belonging and not belonging". The positioning of her artworks in a luxury hotel foyer amplifies this rub.

At the epicentre of Amaler-Raviv's raw world we find the migrant worker and nameless "citizen". For the artist he is every man and every woman; a universal cipher for our bare forked mortality; our conscience. That this man, this denizen of our underworld and underclass, is also a walker is all important because for Amaler-Raviv, as for all restless beings, life is solved by walking - solvitur ambulando.

This exhibition by a stalwart of an all-too-human struggle, when reflected through a sumptuous mirage, perfectly summarises this paradox

"Our nature lies in movement; complete calm is death," Pascal famously remarked. And it is this restlessness that for the past 40 years has shaped Amaler-Raviv's world. The artist finds the pathos of disconnection and displacement everywhere.

It is this life, caught in extremis, on a knife-edge, that distinguishes the artist's entire body of work. Her mantra reads: Keep going, keep walking, keep striving, keep hoping, keep overcoming, keep living - a hard-won positivity indeed, which gives Amaler-Raviv's art its pathos and its heft. The titles of her paintings reinforce this unsettling settlement: why does the feeling of emptiness fill so much space , and, s he waters the garden with a panic button in her hand .

It is this gnawing discomfort that sticks with one while sipping a glass of wine, gleaming yachts bobbing just beyond.

At best we are all afflicted by contradictions, immersed in some glittering pain in a glittering foyer, longing for distraction while caught in the cross-hairs of nagging doubt. This exhibition by a stalwart of an all-too-human struggle, when reflected through a sumptuous mirage, perfectly summarises this paradox.

Drone by Arlene Amaler-Raviv is on at the Ndiza Gallery, Gordon's Bay, until September 1