Benita Munitz on Johann Louw, Oil paintings

Unheralded and almost unknown, a new talent bursts on to the art scene with an exhibition that impacts on you like a sledgehammer.
Suspicious of artworks that hit you between the eyes at first encounter, I had some initial reservations. With Louw's work, though, the longer you look, the more resistance crumbles as visual and intellectual paradoxes become apparent. And the sense of raw malevolent power that emanates from these canvases continues to haunt for some time.
There's nothing to distract us from the huge, sinister, hulking figures that form the substance of Louw's paintings. Their context is not specified.
There is no furniture or objects or environmental clues, other than electric switch plates on steel-grey "walls" scuffed with marks like scar tissue.
That Louw is an artist with a statement to make is clear. Strongly motivated and in command of his means, he involves us as participants rather than merely viewers.
It's not by accident that he renders his figures so that they seem to intrude into our space.
And it's not always a pictorial illusion, for in one remarkably raw piece that unites men and clayish format surface into an indivisible substance, figures in low relief emerge from the turbulent ground.
In Louw's shallow stages, illuminated by a cold light that sculpts painted forms into clay monsters, something is being enacted that is too close for comfort.
In spite of the lace of environmental information, we know these subhuman protagonists and we fear their mindless power. To others beyond our borders, they may suggest Kafkaesque characters, but we know better, experiencing these images with a shock of recognition.
But there's a twist in the tale. A number of twists, in fact.
Among several paradoxes is the undoubted seduction of luscious paint-caked surfaces, which is at extreme odds with the paintings' content. This clues us in to the possibility that other things - not immediately obvious - may be suggested. Things that effectively shift "reading" parameters away from realistic representation (of our worst nightmares) towards realms of metaphor and philosophy.
Looking at these figures (and they compel us to do just that) they seem strangely similar - only their features, complexions and expressions (smirking, sullen, brooding, vacant) vary to some degree. Individuality has been subjugated in favour of shared intimacy and their lumpy forms encased in similar shapeless suits seem to stamp them all as members of an exclusive club. Most intriguing of all, though, is that these bulky forms all seem crafted from the same mould.
Curious indeed. While we've been viewing these protagonists as perpetrator and victims, is Louw suggesting these are two sides of the same coin?
In his first solo exhibition, Louw makes insightful visual comments from a position of conviction. For him, this show will be a hard act to follow.

Johann Louw's fist solo show, An Exhibition of Oil Paintings, shows the work of a young artist determined to get to grips with painting. The work, consisting of near-monochromatic paintings-with-figures, a few landscape and a couple of drawn conté (French chalk) heads, is compelling: one is drawn in, captivated.
The whole manner of the exhibition is rough-hewn - there is a general disregard for conventional ideas of finish and aestheticising detail. The paintings, mostly on board, are without frames: mutton dressed up as mutton, each painting forced to fight its own battle with the viewer, and they do this supremely well.
The paintings, taken individually, have an internal momentum and a feverishness in their execution and conception that establishes a set of pictorial priorities: the eye is caught by and made to struggle through the knotted, pitted, viscous paint that describes the flesh and clothing of bulky, leaden men blundering in and out of the vacant, nowhere spaces they half-occupy. In the most successful of these painting the space in which the figures are set evokes the disturbed apprehension of environment that one experiences on the edge of sleep.
But the somnambulism towards which the paintings teeter is not rewarded by rest - the viewer is pulled back by the agitated surfaces of flesh and garment and the silent anguish that the painter has drawn out of his nameless but naggingly familiar subjects. Louw's sources for these figures are disparate, often garnered from newspapers and magazines, blurred references to those who wield power indiscriminately and, occasionally, to those who may be its victims. There is not much in the space that surrounds these bruised figures to confer any especially meaningful context of action: at best, a vague urban skyline that could as easily be a line of drinks on a bar counter.
They are similar to the species of male imaged in the work of Robert Hodgins and William Kentridge, placing Louw squarely in the current of South African art that draws on the menacing quality of the brutal power-mongering that has informed so much of our history.
Markedly absent, however, are the supporting cast of desks, telephones, guns, cars and boardrooms one associates with such characters. The sheer authority of the paint brings these "un-people" into focus and materialises their presence, physically and psychologically.
Louw's achievement is evidently hard-won. No shortcuts are taken to lend the images an easy grace. At times the gritty toughness of the painting comes undone and becomes clumsy, an incoherent array of marks that fragment the form they intend to describe.
The artist's impatience with the intractable nature of the medium is evident in the way he will, without compunction, blot out a part of a figure with rough scrubbed-on paint: these lacunae are somehow made to deed into the internal momentum of the painting. That the painter has learnt something form the work of painter like Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach is evident in the quality of mark and surface, but rather that resorting to simple minded appropriation, Louw subsumes these potentially overpowering influences within his own expressive idiom.
All in all, this powerful and coherent exhibition shows that Johann Louw is a dedicated painter, unlikely to give in to successful formulae and driven by a rigorous engagement with the medium that promises to continue to develop in intensity and vision.

Gwyneth Harris
Monday 1st November to Saturday 27th November 1999

Writing about a painter and his oeuvre, one enters a zone of unnameable and to a large extent unprecedented ideas, as each individual artist draws on the immense history of the medium, and then either expands or exploits its parameters to his or her own ends. Talking to Johann Louw about his work reveals a deep commitment to the problems of painting and the constant grappling for solutions, which search has itself, time and time again in art history, resulted in the most exceptional painting.

From his conversation one becomes aware of the concerns with which his paintings are invested, and which result in the highly charged works for which he has become known. His admiration for painters such as Cezanne, Bacon, Freud and Auerbach lead to discussion around the term "plasticity", a theme the artist returns to again and again, and which is central to understanding his work. "Plasticity" for Louw, signifies a degree of ambiguity in the reading of form, where form dissolves and resolves, reproducing, in a fashion, the way vision is originally learned. If the viewer struggles to apprehend three-dimensionality in the image, an impact is made on the psyche as a sub-conscious memory of infantile "seeing" is induced. Plasticity as a constant disintegration and re-assertion of form.

Johann Louw reiterates this fundamental concern in various ways, always arriving at the ideal where form is ambiguous and balances on a fulcrum as the vehicle of tactile, visceral appeal, whilst holding structural or visual coherency. The expressive touch of the painter on his canvas, reflects his concern with traditionally romantic, expressive values, whilst the visual interpretation suggests that structure is paramount to his concern. The artist works his figures using both wet in wet (where pigments are mixed or "slurred" on the surface of the painting) and wet over dry techniques, which combination results in a heavily impasted and expressive paint surface. The body parts (head and hands) are painted with small brush strokes as Louw sculpts his forms using an emphatically tonal palate, colour following tone. The clothing, by contrast, is described with a broader, longer stroke, relating to the larger planes and to the movement of drapery. Form and surface are in constant dialogue.

Expressing similar concerns from yet another angle, Louw voices his admiration of sculpture from cultures other than European, and a liking of 'brute' imagery, where rawness combines with formal considerations. Indeed the contained rawness of his painting is one of its most consistent and powerful features.

Johann Louw at Harris Fine Art Louw's (self-confessedly) Kafkaesque and Beckettian male figures have a brutish presence that situates the painter firmly as an artist of his time and place; a product of and witness of the history of this country, born as he was in 1965 and "institutionalised" in a State-owned school. One is reminded of the art of Millet (France, 1814 - 1875), and Courbet (France, 1819 - 1877 ), realists both, who set the teeth of contemporary art viewers on edge with their depictions of working people, unmediated by any aesthetisizing process. Johann Louw shows a comparable disregard for viewers' sensitivities. For the brave individuals who look at and acknowledge his commentary on race, like it or not, the brutish, raw and basic qualities of "whiteness" and "blackness" in his paintings reflect the hot potato of South African life, and it is indeed a brave artist that handles it.

Beckett, Kafka and JM Coetzee provide the artist with literary parallels to his painting, as writers who often create complex metaphors for individual struggle in the context of authoritarian government. However, Louw's crazed, maniacal men from paintings in the early 1990s, dressed in baggy grey suits, storming around their narrow stages and speaking of barely contained violence, have in the last two years been replaced by a new generation of men, mainly seated, mainly black. A psychological "freeing up" seems to have occurred in the artist's imagery.

Gone are the 1950's style grey suits; Louw's men are now clad mostly in open-necked shirts, are more contemporary, more reposed and calm, although still charged with a mental energy that is due in part to the lack of narrative detail, the empty space that surrounds them. The artist describes this new state as existing in a hiatus; a moment of silence in between possibilities. The narrow pictorial and psychological space in which the figures are placed, furnished only with simple chairs (probably borrowed from the artist's memories of institutions) results in a relentless focus, a scrutiny of these men bordering on violation. The viewer is made complicit. This tension is however sometimes alleviated by the disposition of chairs in the space, which is off-frontal, and seems to infer a degree of flexibility, of negotiation within the space, and with the viewer.

This process of "freeing up" that one discerns in recent paintings, may also be noticed in the careful broadening of the artist's palette from the exclusive use of black and white that he used for many years: light red, burnt umber, yellow ochre and occasionally pthalo blue now provide the basis from which he mixes a range of colours. A kindling of colour, as it were.

In conclusion one may remark on the image reproduced on the invitation to the artist's fourth solo exhibition, to be held at Harris Fine Art. Whilst consistent with the above commentary, this painting, the most recent to emerge from the artist's studio, indicates that further iconographical changes might be afoot. In this image the male figure is viewed from a peculiar angle, way below the seated figure and the dog. The chair comes not from an institution, but from a domestic interior. Too soon to speak with any clarity or confidence, however the likelihood of such an image prefiguring another slow shift in this painter's oeuvre, is a strong one.