Carl Becker revisits the scenes captured by the artist, and finds much has changed. Back in 2006 I was living in Johannesburg, working in Fordsburg and painting the city. Like many of us, I had a roller-coaster relationship with the city but I was getting tired of it all and, like a typical Joburger professing to love the city, I was looking for a back door at the same time. On my way to the Cape, I stopped at the Pierneef museum in Graaff-Reinet to look at the Station Panels.I stood before those monumental paintings with their subdued hues and their sense of stasis, and realised that this was the very thing I craved. I wanted to be in those paintings. For some time I had wanted to reinvent myself as a landscape painter and this was a way into the landscape. I would search for the actual places that Pierneef painted. For a painter, there was something suitably unpredictable about this quest: did these idealised images ever exist, or were they fictions to start with?mini_story_image_hleft1Seen as a whole, the Station Panels are an imposing body of work. With the broad mandate to paint "places of scenic beauty or historical interest", Pierneef travelled throughout South Africa, choosing his sites. From the sketches and watercolours he made he produced 28 canvases within three years, ready for the opening of the new Johannesburg Station in 1932. They hung in the concourse, inviting weary commuters to visit the far-flung corners of the old Union of South Africa. The bucolic, uninhabited landscapes have the trick of giving us a sense of belonging, a sense of home. But, in the 80 years since they were painted, seismic changes have happened. Would there be anything left? I was looking forward to the search for the remains.I knew, of course, that Pierneef's work is contested terrain. And yet Pierneef is strangely in my blood. Two of his woodcuts hanging in an uncle's farmhouse outside Pretoria were some of the first original landscapes I'd seen. Their graceful and simplified forms seemed to offer a way of depicting the land that was both real and possible.Pierneef is entrenched in the psyche of many artists of my generation. He casts a shadow that demands that we take him into account on our way to becoming ourselves.I travelled with one eye on the present but also with a vaguely archeological intent - tracing a world submerged beneath highways, townships and Tuscan townhouses. I worked outside when I could, drawing and painting in watercolour. Outside, you often attract the scrutiny of strangers; you are suddenly under pressure to perform. Or you may go completely unnoticed, afraid that if you slip down a crack in the mountain, you will disappear forever. The process is difficult: the light is always changing, one is too hot, one is too cold, one is bothered by flies. You can't find a vantage point in the shade. There is never enough time.block_quotes_start Pierneef would shift a mountain to make it conform to his geometry block_quotes_endAs I worked, I noticed obscure fabrications in the original Pierneefs. In many images, he confuses our idea of size and scale by combining a close-up shot of the foreground with an exaggerated distant view. He also combines views from different times of day. Early morning light falls on Rustenburg kloof beneath the massed cumulus clouds of a Highveld afternoon.As he simplified and flattened, he seized on what was crucial in a landscape. He captured the neutral grey-greens of fynbos, the umbers and mauves of the Karoo, and the chrome greens of bushveld grass in spring.If necessary, Pierneef would shift a mountain to make it conform to his geometry. He was a liar, but even the camera, commonly assumed to tell the "truth", merely gives us one rendering of it. These days, I'm inclined to accept the veracity of Pierneef's confections. His paintings are complex constructions that trigger our recollections of a place. They give us the illusion, and we tend to take it. His distortions and simplifications concur with memory in a way that the product of the all-seeing camera lens often doesn't.You don't need to look hard for the symbols of a changed political order - these things are inscribed in the landscape. The proud acacia in the centre of Pierneef's Rustenburg Kloof is gone: instead there is a small derelict building, perhaps from the 1960s. It was once a changeroom for picnicking white people; now it stands abandoned. On one of my visits, the minimalist 1960s bungalows were occupied by conferencing trade union members - the clenched fists on their T-shirts uncannily echoing Afrikaner workers' unions of the 1930s. In Parys, near the site of Pierneef's tranquil Vaal River panel, is another plesieroord where camping berths with their crumbling braais stand empty except for the occasional down-and-out whitey drifting through. The place could do with a lick of paint, but that wouldn't lift the melancholia. At sundown the manne are still to be found at the riverside, clutching quarts of Black Label around a fire. This time they are black and listening to kwaito while the polluted Vaal gurgles gently by. The volk have surrendered the public spaces and withdrawn to the privacy of their game lodges.full_story_image_hleft2In Louis Trichardt, Pierneef painted an extensive view of the town, with Gerhard Moerdijk's church as the centrepiece. Old hostilities are still at play in the tussle over the town's name change to Makhado, whose son's army was defeated by a Boer commando that camped on the very site where the church was built.On the gravel of the Swartberg Pass I narrowly missed a cyclist coming down at speed. The once daunting road has been reduced to an afternoon's time trial. In the Valley of Desolation, Pierneef depicted those eternal dolerite columns as proof of the Almighty: now they are overflown by paragliders. In the 1930s, driving from Pretoria to Musina took two days. Now it takes four hours. Our sense of scale has changed and with that we have lost our awe.The world of the Station Panels is safe, almost domesticated. Sites of conflict, like Majuba or Louis Trichardt, lie before us bathed in light like 17th-century Dutch paintings. You may regard these empty landscapes with their rolling fields as the product of a proprietary, colonising gaze. But time has changed the meaning of both the paintings and the sites themselves. What once was monumental is now vulnerable. The tide of nationalism that held Pierneef close has long since receded. What are we to make of these messages from a lost world?Working at the sites made me appreciate Pierneef's fidelity to his source material. Hundreds of studies of plant life, geology and cloud patterns are not the product of a man intent on ideological pursuits. They are the work of someone who believes in the redemptive power of nature.What he had in front of him in the 1930s was a Nirvana of sorts, and it might be more rewarding to see Pierneef not as a manipulator but as a truth-teller. Perhaps the story of these paintings is one of a vision betrayed, both in our dealing with the land and the people on it.story_article_right1Afrikaner nationalism included a strand that sought a genuine African identity. For Pierneef, this meant study of the indigenous art of both the San and the Ndebele people.Close to the Hartbeespoort Dam is the home of Pierneef's contemporary, the writer Gustav Preller. The modest thatch-and-stone dwelling blends seamlessly into the surrounding bush. It is a restaurant today and on the walls there are photos of Pierneef and Preller sitting on the stoep, smoking and scheming. Would Pierneef and Preller have dreamt that the project of Afrikaner nationalism ends in the looming towers of the Pelindaba nuclear facility, a stone's-throw away?Today's artists are used to seeing the beer can in the river. We are wary of glossing over such things in the quest for beauty. We are rightly suspicious of Pierneef's billowing clouds with their promise of rain and renewal. Too much has been enclosed, trodden over, built upon, discarded and lost. All of this intrudes on the landscape and shapes how we see Pierneef, yet our landscape is still capable of preposterous beauty.The sublime moment can still be had, but those monumental forms and big spaces are shrinking, reduced by the human figure that was once so absent.Becker has taken part in many group shows and has had seven solo exhibitions since 1991. This is an edited extract of his speech given at the opening of the exhibition, JH Pierneef: a S pace for Landscape, in Johannesburg..