Mad Mad World

Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) is the classic trigger when thinking of an unadorned darkness in art. At the heart of Europe’s Enlightenment project, Goya doubted the efficacy of Reason. It was Human Irrationality that drew him – the madness of war, social depravity and injustice, the inner turmoil and torment of the soul. His ‘Black Paintings’ and ‘Los Caprichos’ are seminal in this regard. Not only does Goya challenge the Sovereignty of Reason in the 18th century, he anticipates the Modern Age, shaped by psychoanalysis – an age which still defines and afflicts us, because it allows for no reprieve. Indeed, this current historical moment is widely considered to be defined by disaffection. Ours is the Age of Anger and Despair, which, unsurprisingly, has prompted a return to the Inquisition – a return to fanaticism, fundamentalism, fascism.

If this prelude is fitting when considering the works in charcoal and in gouache and watercolour on paper by Johann Louw, it is because his art is profoundly informed by darkness. As for its manifest content? It is distinctly mammalian – animal, human, vertebrate. A ‘Bobbejaan’ returns the viewer’s gaze, positioned invasively at the lower lip of the sheet of paper, on the verge of veering out of the glowering darkness into our poorly guarded precinct. It is the unease of an unknowable encounter that compels. This disturbance is repeated in another ‘Bobbejaan’ leering at the viewer in passing. A hyena assumes a similar predatory role. Though here, predation is a projected dread. We are not snagged in an animal’s consciousness, but our own. It is the fraught matrix of Man and Animal, a matrix shaped by human fear and arrogance that is definitional – an embattled need for power, or the hunter’s dark will which J.M. Coetzee, in Dusklands, describes as the killer’s instinct to transform wilderness into number. Enumeration is akin to murder, wilderness a heart of darkness. It is Goya who lies at the blackened root of this matrix. As for Louw? What do his drawings trigger?

I am reminded of Marlon Brando as Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, a bleakly dystopian adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, of the final solution at its core – exterminate the brutes – and the mad muttering – the horror, the horror. But this is my association. What of yours? Who or what is the bald middle-aged white male who occupies so many of the drawings? He hovers at a shrouded intersection, attired in what could be a hospital smock. His head veers backward on seeing a prehistoric reptile. He is snagged in a black-green square, brow furrowed, eyes furiously shut. He hovers, inert and bust-like, before a wild dog. In profile, he gazes across a wide and empty landscape. Genuflects alongside his doppelganger. Finds affinity in the pose and bearing of an adjacent primate. Or then, seems caught in a thicket of trees. Whether in a landscape or a blackened interior, whether alone or alongside an animal, it is an ominous desolation that holds sway – a vale of shadows.

Melancholia is an understatement. As is despair. Perhaps, Arthur Schopenhauer’s gloom is more fitting? ‘Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things,’ he writes. ‘Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.’ This is an existential view, with all the nausea which such a fraught insight carries. More witheringly, Schopenhauer tells us that ‘It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else.’ The dice is loaded, loss a given. It is this fatalism which consumes Louw’s sepulchral vision. Even when they capture an outer-world, his drawings seem entombed, snagged, locked-in. This is because they are fundamentally psychological. Louw’s is a vision of Fallen Man, Lost Man … Man in an endangered realm of his own making.

As for Woman? She appears, decapitated, in voluptuous red, suspended in mid-air, not grounded, not solid – a projected apparition that emanates from a masculine psyche. Everything made and unmade, drawn, erased, then drawn again, spills and pools from a mind and hand in touch with dread and sorrow, for Louw’s is an art spawned from a cool white skull devoured by night. The title of a famous aquatint by Goya reads – ‘The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.’ Louw concurs. If it is night that abolishes reason, it is also night that secretes what the rational mind strives to suppress. In this vital regard, Johann Louw’s drawings and paintings not only adhere to Schopenhauer’s pitiless sorrow, they not only embrace the dark soul of the predator, and neither do they merely dramatize an existential Sturm und Drang. Rather, they wordlessly tell us that escape is impossible, that against morality, against any failed controlling force – everything is permissible.