Artist Kate Gottgens captures the essence of suburban restlessness

A guidebook to the indigenous trees of the Cape will be of no use to negotiating artist Kate Gottgens's new exhibition of 34 oil paintings.

Most of the trees in this Durban-born painter's sometimes raunchy, occasionally wistful exhibition at SMAC in Cape Town come from faraway places. The origin of the tall Mexican and California fan palms in her works Interference and Side Effects (Elegy to Suburbia), both colour-bleached studies of suburban landscapes, are self-evident.

The custard-yellow house with a large palm tree in Side Effects is based on a photo she took of a house in Bergvliet, although Gottgens mostly used Google Street View to find scenes she could paint.

"I like the domestic and vernacular," said Gottgens, whose light-filled studio is on a smallholding in Hout Bay.

Her studies of suburban lots with unfinished sailboats and landscaped pools often include hints of "something jaded".

Cabin Fever is a lurid suburban melodrama chock-full with tropical musa. Better known as a banana plant, the ornamental perennial spills over a precast cement wall with green paint dribbling up it. But it is the caravan and its relationship to a piece of graffiti reading "sex" that most intrigues.

Unlike Irma Stern, whose floral still lifes from the 1930s and 1940s were painted in dramatic brush strokes using thick oils, Gottgens paints flatly. Her scenes often feel incomplete. Details are unimportant. A couple performing oral sex in Arena is rendered in outlines.

Pool Club (Everything Here is Nice) offers no sex, just an orgy of musa and palms next to an unpeopled suburban swimming pool. Voice Mail shows a half-empty residential pool, its stagnant water a eutrophic green. Saturday Sun crowds six children into a rinky-dink inflatable pool.

Gottgens says her many pool scenes skirt the "edge of kitsch" and are descriptive of the "salad says" of whiteness. Like painter Kirsten Beets earlier this year in her exhibition Mirage at Salon 91, Gottgens offers the pool as place of uncertain nostalgia and ecological apocalypse.

Captive shows how we all increasingly negotiate bad news. It shows a prone figure reading his cellphone against a backdrop of dwarf banana leaves. Gottgens renders this scene of contemporary boredom in mostly limes and leafy greens. Her tone may be wistful but her technique is assured, seductive even.

• 'Tired from Smiling' is on at SMAC, 145 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock, Cape Town, until January 13.

• This article was originally published in The Times.