V&A WATERFRONT, ULUNDI HOUSE, PORTSWOOD ROAD, CAPE TOWN

8 March - 1 April 2023

This collection of Lionel Smit's paintings and bronze sculpture opens on 8th March.

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The Movement Between

Essay by Prof Ernst van der Wal, Department of Visual Arts, Stellenbosch University

Comprising painting, sculpture and film, Lionel Smit’s latest body of work explores the theme of exposure. While the term calls to mind forms of revelation and discovery, it also has bearing in the field of photography, where it refers to the amount of light that reaches a light-sensitive surface. 

The ability of the photographer to produce an image depends directly on their awareness and manipulation of light. Such an understanding of image-creation as technological enterprise serves as leitmotif for Smit’s artistic practice. He works with the image in terms of both physical and conceptual outcomes created through processes of exposure. With the camera serving as a point of connection, Smit asks what we expose to the lens and, by implication, to a larger public audience. 

With human figures moving in and out of focus, Smit strategically uses blurred surfaces to speak of our relation to the world. In some works, it seems as if the human is emerging from some otherworldly realm, slowly drifting into focus. In his careful manipulation of the image, Smit mimics the function of a camera lens, which tends to establish greater crispness and clarity of vision in a world of blurred obscurity.

With distinct and solid contours often giving way to diffused shapes and unworked surfaces, Smit’s paintings seem to reside in some liminal space between the lucid and ethereal. In some of the sculptural works, we see finely modelled features giving way to rough, serrated edges, with the figurative and the abstract finding poetic balance in the final bronze pieces.

This exhibition also offers Smit the opportunity to reflect on the various art traditions that have influenced his own creative output. We see the extreme abstraction, wild brushwork and vivid colours of the Fauves brought into conversation with subjects harking back to the Classical Art Movement. The result is a dynamic tension between the simplified and the detailed, the raw and the refined. 

A painting of a face, delicately rendered to suggest illumination through dappled light, is suddenly interrupted by an abstract shape or covered with a flat layer of colour, as if a photographic filter was suspended between the artist and the model. The physicality of the medium grounds such experiments, reminding the viewer that this is a painterly interpretation of reality and its complex framing devices.   

Be it in painting, the moving image, or the three-dimensional artefact, Smit’s artistic practice demonstrates how forms of revelation and systems of exposure bear imbue and inspire the life and the world of the artist.  

Everard Read CIRCA Cape Town

Everard Read CIRCA Cape Town was unveiled in November 2016 (across the road from the existing gallery space). This addition to the Everard Read/CIRCA group has allowed the gallery in Cape Town to maximise its capacity to 900 m² and expand its exhibition schedule to include a further 4 formal gallery spaces and an outside 50 m² sculpture garden. December 2016 saw Everard Read Cape Town opening a satellite gallery in Franschhoek.

Always dynamic, the gallery strives to maximise the exposure and dissemination of fine contemporary painting and sculpture to a broad audience. An important contributor to the already vibrant cultural life of South Africa, Everard Read/CIRCA maintains a strong and unique identity for itself.  A programme of both solo and group exhibitions is often accompanied by publications serving to showcase established contemporary artists as well as the emerging younger generations. Whilst artists from the United Kingdom, Europe, Japan and the USA are exhibited, the gallery retains at its core an impressive stable of South African artists.  

A close dialogue between all of the Everard Read and CIRCA spaces ensures that the galleries have even further access to the finest paintings, sculptures and new media works from abroad and around the sub-continent. The gallery concurrently interface with international galleries and participate in both national and international art fairs. 

The gallery strives to continue to nurture local and international talent and advise both public and private collectors around the world. 

For inquiries at Everard Read CIRCA Cape Town:

Lena Sulik
lena@everard.co.za
+27 21 418 4527

Opening hours:
Monday - Friday: 09:00 - 17:00
Saturday: 09:00 - 13:00
Sunday: CLOSED
Pubic holidays: CLOSED