Christiaan Conradie - Against A Narrow Heart

131 A Gallery presents Against A Narrow Heart, which features 21 paintings by Christiaan Conradie in what is his first solo exhibition in South Africa, having presented works in over 50 international art fairs and 8 solo shows. The exhibition will run from the 29th of April 2021 until the 8th of June 2021 online and the artworks will be up on the walls at 131 from Thursday the 29th of April 2021 until the 8th June 2021.

"What matters is matter – flesh, bone, muscle – and then another dimension – dimensionless – that makes us human. Human embodiment is the anchor and ground from which Christiaan Conradie departs into the groundless. Nothing in his world is possible without the bodies’ primacy – felt, touched, painted. If the human head is primary – the defining motif-factor-condition for the painting – its substance is only realisable when, in the aftermath of the painting of flesh-bone-muscle, one arrives upon its tenuous and fragile complexity.      

Conradie loves the aged body, primarily male. What he sees is not the being as he/she imagines themselves to be, but what their bodies generate. We all generate. Self-possession is a fantasy. As is self-aggrandising portraiture. Conradie does nothing of the sort. Instead, he shifts the yearning intrinsic in a body, asks what it is, not what it claims itself to be. That he does so without permitting himself the fantasy that he – the painter – knows the consciousness of his subject, is remarkable.  

Conradie has given up the ghost, centuries in the making, that he, the painter, knows his subject. Instead, what we get is a rune and an oddity, a figure in situ whose consequence is irreducible to their consciousness, or the artist’s projection thereof. Instead, what we get is doubt – the subject’s, the artist’s – which outweighs the Kantian fantasy: Know Thyself. In an Age of Anger, in which there is zero room for human complexity, it is vital that we pay attention to art that recognises the criticality of doubt. 

No surety exists in a likeness. No one looks in the way they expect themselves to. Ever. We are bludgeoned by time’s refusal to subject itself to our demands. 

Conradie asks us to rethink naturalism, portraiture, and, in the midst of an embodied presence, the magical reality that is existence. He reminds us that we are not the victims of this age of anger, that love, care, compassion, understanding, still thrive. He does not seek to explain the world or alter it. He seeks instead to liberate us from its narrow heart."

Words by Ashraf Jamal    

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