In what is undoubtedly one of the most disruptive and disturbing years in recent history, paying havoc with peoples’ lives, dreams and aspirations, André Naudé presents an exquisite body of paintings in an exhibition which he titles, simply and unceremoniously: ‘Beige’.

The title provides the perfect starting point to write about an artist that understands colour and form like few other artists: rightfully acknowledged as one of South Africa’s foremost colourists. But more than this, the title is immediately evocative of the playfulness, wry sense of humour and dark irony that permeate Naudé’s work, and life, in various ways. Not an artist that lets himself be dictated to by whim or the capriciousness of the artworld, Naudé’s visual language is uniquely and unmistakably his own. “Cantankerous”, Naudé describes himself when we speak, and I smile. Conversations with Naudé is never dull, always inflected with humour, and always contextualised by his immense knowledge and love of art.

Naudé’s prolific career, and his involvement with all aspects of the art world – as lecturer, teacher, curator, adjudicator, but primarily as artist – spans more than four decades from the mid-1970s to date. This exhibition, as was his mid-career retrospective at the Pretoria Art Museum in 2001, is again reflective of salient aspects of his work, drawing together, but also taking further, the rich diversity of his processes of making in eminently seductive works that speak not only of colour but of a consummate understanding of paint, line, form, composition, of sheer immersion in his work as a whole.

Art critic Lucia Burger, in the first line of her opening speech for one of Naudé’s many solo exhibitions, stated unequivocally: “Andre Naudé is a flirt”. I quote her because it is essentially Naudé’s love affair with paint that shines through in all of his work over his illustrious career. His flirtation with paint, with medium and material, is perhaps most viscerally discernible in his distinctive use of colour. It is reflective of a special knowledge of how colours will mix; how they will look, interact with, recede, and advance on the surface of the canvas. The same entrancement that holds the viewer’s attention is also the artist’s entrancement and enchantment with paint. As I write this, I recall the different spaces in which I have encountered Andre’s work. I conjure up, ‘tangibly’ almost, the colour of certain works that drew me to the work. Whether in variations of solid or evanescent blues and yellows, in ominous reds and black, it is Naudé’s colour that resonates as one of the most tantalizing and enigmatic elements of his work.

Ultimately, Naudé’s manipulation of his medium and material enables a world at once familiar and ambiguous, ordered and disrupted. The very substance of paint, of marks on the surface, references not only Naudé’s engagement with the world, but the skill, commitment and judgment one senses have been honed over years: a particular, intimate connection between the artist’s hand and head – a tactile and tacit knowledge of subject and medium that is imbedded in the work. His is a dialogue between practice and thinking that is layered not only in terms of technical virtuosity, but layered in terms of meaning and subtle references/links that viewers might make when looking at his work.

However, while Naudé’s work might be read partly as a commentary on life’s absurdities and ironies (displayed more than ever in this extraordinary year), this is not an artist setting out in the first place to dictate meaning. His work is seductive in the way that it ‘entices’ meaning. From smaller works of pure abstraction with a lightness and economy of brushstrokes to the layered complexity of works in which familiar motifs recur, Naude’s work is a life recast in paint. The surface is the primary site, in the very gesture and substance of paint, where meaning is first and foremost generated and where it resides. It is a flirtation with paint that comes across in a life lived with and through his art. And it is, ironically, not beige.

Bloom at Association of Arts Pretoria - Opening Speech by Iaan Bekker

Everything has a beginning, middle and end, but not necessarily in that order.

Gesture being the primary mode of composition leads to a disruption of space. This has consequences in time - it slows down perception of the work, and in doing so focus attention on mark-making and the materiality of paint itself.

Following from this synchronising of making and seeing comes the association between time and light. The work aims to divert, concentrate and diffuse light in the same sense that it manipulates time in looking at, and seeing the relations of elements in the work.

The constant stepping towards the surface to operate upon it, and the stepping back to orientate the effects of operative action constitutes a rhythm, a ritual. In this manner the dramatic performance of painting and the critique of appraising effects becomes consolidated. Significance is defined in retrospect.

The subject of the work is a process of sensual and feeling modalities. Reason and calculus is reserved for formal application. The painting subject is never complex. The results are never simple. This is the consequence of compounded interest and attention vested in making the work over time. Gesture, which is immediate, is subjected to a maturity of aesthetic, which is timeless.

No matter what subject or formal route painting pursues it remains a slow medium. Even if its referents are subsequent image processing media as in photography or film or video, which accelerates and focuses the sign as efficiencies of meaning and escapes into a textual syntax, paint remains rooted in telluric concerns and anchors perception in the present. Paint is sensual before it can be temporal. this is why it endures longer as a site of memory or emotional inscription.

Even if painting can achieve immediate registration of its image/intent/meaning programme it remains a linear process of sub-assembly of transmissive gestures. There is a sequence of decisions pending calibration - we cannot know where the work begins or ends, but we know how it moves. It is a staged evolution and adaptation of selected elements under pressure to transform until it achieves equilibrium. One can speak of arrested development without a trace of cynicism.

Andre Naude paintings allows the viewer to see this operation unfold. It is consistent with the intimacy of selecting subject matter which is often interiorised or selected from domestic environments. He shares rather that pontificate or instruct. Yet the work requires perceptual education to fully appreciate how this is achieved. Yet this is not a requirement to simply enjoy what one sees. The sensation is one of stress-free chromatic hedonism.

One does not think about painting when one paints. At best the making process allows one to drift among impulses and options. Decisions may be deferred or revised in a way-finding exercise that allows associations to at first multiply and then be subtracted until a certain mood is established in which one can be reconciled with oneself - this may be fearsome or joyous. A dialectic resolves between identity and diversity. What is the sound of one hand painting etc?

The courage to enter knowingly into psychic regions of uncertainty and chaos is something that artists willingly take on. For this they need to be respected and encouraged by those who safely stand at a distance and describe the studio as a psychosis. Painting is a willful induction of change, and in that sense it prefigures the scale and intensity of events in the world at large. In doing so the artist explores and anticipates new modes of receptivity.

There is a syncopation of fragments in the work that gradually coheres without resisting the eventual syntax of descriptive language. There is the deferment of closure that expands the gestures of gestalt. There is invention of imaginative relations between image making sets of symbols and their settings. Here is a practice of lyricism on an epic scale, even within the space of a hand's breath.

- Iaan Bekker (Brand Wealth)

Naudé se werk 'n besinging van verf