A really great start to the new year, Teresa Lizamore’s artspace gallery, out in Cresta (outskirts beyond Jozi) shows three relatively established artists: cobus van bosch, jp meyer and varenka paschke.
Cobus had to be my favorite of the bunch, depicting battle sites of old in varnished cattle bone. Above is a beautiful piece (entitled trench), and the works range from small to large, very textured to extremely polished and subtle. They feel like a cross between mosaics and topological maps, but are grounded in a literal flesh.
JP’s stuff felt very pop-arty and decorative, but the more time you spend with them, the more they change. I felt like they were kind of interactive – my eyes got dizzy and danced in front of the larger pieces, and so I had to surf around them with my body in order grasp the full experience.
And Varenka was somewhere between the two – she had an ironic brush stroke or 700 between her images, which often mimicked silk screening or a pixelated image, but almost always in warm hues and with odd portraits….
