Residue 2009

‘Artworks exhibit residues of their originating sparks. The thrill, or terror, or anticipation, or eagerness that accompanies the welling up of ambition and the first stirrings of artistic action can often be discerned in the work’s physical enactments and its conceptual transcendence. Inspiration often supplies the compelling power that makes art captivating.’[i]

Lionel Smit is a painter in the truest sense. For him, the paint itself and the very act of painting constitute his fine art to the fullest degree. Drawing on the American action painters of the late 1940s, Smit cites the painting process as his first and lasting concern: ‘Painting to me is like an energy release…with the finished painting being only the physical manifestation, a kind of residue, of the actual work of art, which is the act… of the painting's creation itself.’[ii]

Smit’s subject matter is consistent – portraiture is his preferred mode and his models are hand-picked out of the tapestry of his daily life. These are not famous people, or people with extraordinary power within their communities. The people Smit chooses to paint possess a particular aesthetic that appeals to his visual sensitivity, but nothing more in the way of social influence. However, up-scaled to many times their life size and abstracted according to Smit’s particular technique, these faces are imbued with an immense authority that is impossible to overlook.

The paintings – or, more accurately, the residues of the artwork – are monumental in scale, standing higher than the average man and wider than the same man with arms outstretched. From a distance, the viewer is struck by the painting as apparition – a larger-than-life rendition of someone that is almost familiar. Intrigued by this image, the viewer is drawn forward, closer to the painting itself, in order to examine the fine details of the memorable face. It is from this point that the ‘conceptual transcendence’ of the work develops. Close up it becomes clear that fine detail, in the sense of faithful realism, is not Smit’s interest by any means. The picture plane begins to disintegrate. The face is interrupted by bands of solid colour and gestural swathes of paint. The eye is drawn to drips and splatters produced by the enterprise of working on such a large scale. Slices of light and shadow reveal segments of the canvas almost untouched, other areas are overworked in layers that run out the edges of the form.

Drawn by degrees into the multifarious dimensions of the portrait, the painted surface becomes more significant than the form the artist has chosen to represent. Like the artist, the viewer does not operate completely automatically. Unlike, for instance, the vast colour fields of Rothko, in which the viewer can become lost entirely in subconscious wandering, Smit’s paintings retain ties to figuration. Hence, the viewer is confronted with random analytical challenges as s/he is absorbed into the surface of the work.

Smit describes the creation of each painting as ‘a burst of energy that feels uncontrollable at first’. Once the initial surge is spent, Smit enters into an activity that requires ‘a balance of spontaneous actions’[iii]. Within this, it is ‘the process, the waiting, the controlled accidents’[iv] that are most significant.

His refusal to refute figurative painting altogether, opting rather for a compromise between his delight in the act of painting and diligent representation, Smit attributes to his belief in the ‘portrait as a vehicle to communicate a broader subject’[v]. Despite Smit’s view of the painting as secondary to the act of painting itself, this energy is not lost to the viewer. Residues of the action remain. Through the access point of the represented face the audience, although prevented from viewing what Smit views as the artwork itself, is able nonetheless to ‘participate in the beauty of the body as a landscape of all human experience.’[vi] - Jacqueline Nurse, September 2009