Different Strokes: Shadows bright as glass

18 November 2014 - 02:08 By Lin Sampson
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THE ARTIST CONSUMED: Arlene Amaler-Raviv's 'Sunday Afternoon in the Suburbs'
THE ARTIST CONSUMED: Arlene Amaler-Raviv's 'Sunday Afternoon in the Suburbs'

Some artists like Arlene Amaler-Raviv reflect their work in their whole being. With her intense, neurotic face, and her sudden laugh, she has the same gravitas and acute intelligence evident in her body of work.

She has done time; painted for 40 years. Has not sought personal publicity.

''I'm not known in the art world as a sweetie pie because I'm adamant that my work gets into the right hands and is dealt with in the right way."

As an artist she belongs to a group I have named ''the Neurotics", intelligent and wayward. Even when the subject is as light as a vacuum cleaner or the yellow pages fluffed into a pope's mitre, there is depth.

Looking at some of her paintings is like witnessing a hideous crime, the framed pictures of the South African newspaper headlines, with shadows bright as glass.

There are glimpses of the salt mines of grief, depression, narcissistic injury.

''I came from Johannesburg 15 years ago. I was in a major depression and I couldn't paint. I had on the wall a number of canvases and my daughter wrote to me from New York.

"She said: 'I know you are in a severe depression.'"

She had seen written on a pavement: ''Why does the feeling of emptiness fill so much space?

"So, I painted emptiness for two years." Emptiness 2004, an oil and enamel on aluminium, is my favourite picture.

Working in oil on aluminium with its icy surface gives the work a hallucinatory aspect; confetti 2000 looks like hundreds of shrivelled toenails.

One could use the word consummate; but consumed would be better.

''Painting has been my life," she says. She has been learning, workshopping, exhibiting in New York, Berlin, London.

''When I first arrived in Cape Town I was invited by Kevin Brain to do the District Six project. I painted 299 portraits of the dispossessed."

She placed them on the ground in Hanover Street, covered them with glass and surrounded them with 299 phone directories which blew up in the wind ''and sounded like weeping".

Through her work strolls ''Joburg man": ''He is the icon, a man who has a right to have a voice and not carry the burden."

Her artistic voice emerges out of the unfairness of the world. Historical turning points amplify the theme of urban alienation: the fall of the Iron Curtain, the end of apartheid, the collapse of Wall Street, the uprising of Tahrir Square.

One of her latest paintings is entitled Twitter, 2012 and was created in her residency in Berlin during the emergence of the Arab Spring.

Her images range from the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange, to a series of Botswana banknotes printed on hahnemuhle paper, to her own canvas diary of giving up cigarettes; brush strokes of addiction.

''But I didn't keep it up," she says sadly, lighting up.

  • Her exhibition runs until January 30 at the Baxter Theatre
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