Poppekas: van droewige speletjies

“All the world’s a stage

And all of the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts.”

William Shakespeare, As You Like It (1599)

In this particular passage, Shakespeare conceptualizes life as a spatial and performative condition.  The stage could be considered as a metaphorical space in which identity is constructed or deconstructed if you will, through changing roles, relationships and encounters.  The specific reference to “entrances” and “exits” are significant, considering that an individual’s sense of identity or alternatively, lack or denial thereof, is never fixed, but illusionary and in a constant state of flux according to how, where and when they enter or leave specific social or relational spaces.

Strange, ominous and foreboding spaces and places of the conscious and unconscious imagination, mannequins, masks, dolls, the real and the unreal, presence and absence, all come together in the work of Johann Louw in which Louw himself seems to play the part of the main protagonist.  In Louw’s new solo exhibition entitled “Poppekas”, referring to a child’s doll’s house or closet, the title in itself seems toallude to so many conceptual clues, suggestions and associations.  One cannot help but think of a child’s play tinged with a touch of naughtiness.  Yet, in Louw’s work, the ever evasive, frivolous court jester who never seems to tire of entertaining us with his visually absurd tongue-in-cheek jokes and irreverent visual suggestions, cannot seem to escape the ever present and underlying thread of the serious, the contemplative, the introspective and even the foreboding in his work.  This disconcerting undercurrent and lurking shadows in Louw’s work hints at the grimmer aspects pertaining to our lives as humans living in an ever-increasing plastic, virtual world.

Other than the notions of ‘space’ and ‘place’ being recontextualized and contemplated in Louw’s work, the body of work on display, also alludes to the illusionary and unreal nature of our very existence as human beings, the painful disconnectedness and estrangement between self and other – yet all forcefully, willfully and uncomfortably depicted and juxtaposed in the same spaces reminiscent of film stills which forms part of seemingly larger narratives.  Louw refers to this strange dichotomy in his own words by stating that “the manufactured becomes the only Real; Baudrillard’s hyper-reality the only reality and this hyper-reality the only possibility of sublimation or transcendence.”

In response to Baudrillard’s concept of a hyper-reality and space of existence of our own making, I would like to refer to two paintings by the post-impressionist artist Paul Gauguin entitled “Spirit of the Dead Watching” (1892) and “Where do we come from?  What are we? Where are we going?” (1897) in which the artist’s search and quest for the creation of his own utopia in a dystopian world is mused upon and also reminds us of the evocative title of one of Louw’s previous solo exhibitions entitled “Return from Cythera” (2013).   In the title of this particular solo exhibition of Louw, the reflection upon the elusivenessof a utopian space of being as it pertains to the reference to Jean-Antoine Watteau’s rococo painting entitled “The Embarkation to the Island of Cythera” (1717) becomes evident.  In both Louw’s paintings in ‘Poppekas’ and in Gauguin’s two paintings the absent is made present through the artist’s particular choice and manner of representation. Gauguin’s two works can be understood in its search to know what exactly it means to exist, when the boundaries between presence and absence, life and death, self and the other, the visible and the invisible, the unknown and the unknown is no longer secure.

Finally, Louw’s paintings and drawings could be regarded as a meditation and reflection on man’s search for meaning and a possible livable utopia of his own making, in an ever-increasing dystopian world in which the frightful and seemingly absurd manifestation of our own human condition is brought into question.