“Jaco van Schalkwyk’s artworks are subtle and complex visual chronicles. We do not perceive his artworks instantaneously. Van Schalkwyk’s works should be pondered for their true significance to reveal and manifest the deeper meaning of the works. Jaco van Schalkwyk is not a visual one-liner… ever.
Van Schalkwyk’s previous solo exhibition “Just a Matter of Time” explored the documentary and archival characteristics of visual art. The pictorial plot of the exhibition centred on Van Schalkwyk’s exploration of his childhood religious community. The intimate and subjective simplicity with which the artist approached his subject created works of remarkable pathos and fragility. “Just a Matter of Time” bridged the divide of heritage and modernity, in an attempt to define the significance of individuality within the dictums of an insolar community.
With Van Schalkwyk’s latest exhibition “I, John, am the one who heard and saw these things…” which opens on the 24th of October 2013 at the Barnard Gallery, the artist again revisits spiritual and religious ideology, but with this exhibition the artist explores the intertwined nature of faith and art. Van Schalkwyk recontextualizes the perpetation of ritual and allegory to create social cohesion and moral clarity. Van Schalkwyk depicts imagined visual narratives and biographies to explore the synthesis of flesh and faith.
The fluctuations of social codes and norms are depicted as fragmented narratives and visual allegories representative of pivotal moments (punctum temporis) in individual lives. The individuals depicted within these visual allegories, express the artist’s notion of character. Character, as referring to qualities, not belonging to specific individuals, but to all human beings. The allegorical dynamic offers the artist a vehicle to deal with the antithetical relation of nature and culture. Allegory is the nemesis of straight forward communication because it reveals and conceals its meaning simultaneously and avoids direct explanations. Van Schalkwyk’s use of narrative allegory as a genre is characterised by intertextuality. Narrative is built in relation to preceding visual imagery and iconographic and subjective symbolism. The majority of artworks in the “I, John, am the one who heard and saw these things…” exhibition, references imagery from historical artworks or religious text. These act as pretext to most of the narrative allegories. Thus Van Schalkwyk’s works encode information from the greater history of art. The Baroque, Romanticism, 17th century Protestant allegories, and the material manifestations of spiritual magnificence through religious reliquaries, are all alluded to by van Schalkwyk. Van Schalkwyk abandons minimalist restraint to create eclectic visual rituals that acts as an abridgement of the artists ideas regarding contemporary virtues. Van Schalkwyk’s works represent pictures as eroded moral puzzles.
What does the beautiful image leave behind Van Schalkwyk’s works both echo and question the expressive ornamentation and violent intensity of our age. We find ourselves in an era of hypertheatralisation. The mundane are elevated to dubious significance and relevance. The empty gorgeousness of commerce through image and advertising, personified by “reality” television and voracious consumerism, is an anathema to the artist. For Van Schalkwyk, beauty stands in intimate relation to the ugly. He is both the creator and questioner of beauty. Van Schalkwyk does not moralize, but rather subverts through pictorial parody and intertextuality. The paintings create their own contextual narrative independently of set interpretation which is characteristic of the fragmented and inconclusive nature of contemporary art. One may say van Schalkwyk’s artworks reveal the sublime damnation and redemption of the beautiful within contemporary art – within contemporary society. Life, art, faith and beauty intertwine to the point of being indiscernible. In a world devoted to the surface of the surface, van Schalkwyk urges you to close your eyes and open your mind.”
Sandra Hanekom
