oil on canvas

Artwork date: 1972
Signature details: signed and dated
Exhibited: Biennale of São Paulo, Brazil, 1973.
Literature: Berman, E. and Nel, K. (2009). Alexis Preller: Collected Images. Johannesburg: Shelf Publishing, a comparable example titled Icon Barbare (Adam) illustrated on p.230.

(1)

102 x 102 cm

Notes:

On first encountering this electrifying and vibrant painting by Alexis Preller from 1972, one is immediately struck by its hypersaturated colour palette. Simply titled Adam, it belongs to a period in Preller’s career where the figuration of male subjects was taking interesting directions and nuances. As was often Preller’s practice, he painted several versions of and variations on the Adam theme through the late 1960s and early 1970s. As Berman and Nel (2009)1 point out, much of the importance of this work derives from its status as a variation on a significant original Adam intaglio from 1969. Initially thought to be lost, this earlier work was subsequently rediscovered in a private collection in the USA and returned to South Africa. The almost lifesize fibreglass and oil intaglio depicts a powerfully dramatic male figure, posed in the ancient Greek kouros style of a free-standing young male nude statue with arms at his sides, though Preller’s is without arms, and has a direct and unmistakably sexualised presence. With this work, along with the two paintings The Creation of Adam I and The Creation of Adam II, Preller thus inaugurates in the late 1960s a series of Adamic figures that might be grouped with the Apollonian torsos that find their best expression in the magisterial Marathon of 1970. As Berman and Nel (2009)2 explain:[Preller was now focused on] the Biblical myth of the origin of humankind and the parallel return to the origin of his own creative language. In both cases, the focus fell on Adam, the first human figure to be shaped in the Garden of Eden… Adam was specifically the first man and thus the essential male prototype, just as Apollo was the ideal of male beauty. […] Preller freelycelebrated both (emphases in original).

The current work on auction fits exactly within this group, and demonstrates many of the key characteristics of Preller’s imagining of the male psyche in his oeuvre and in his personal mythography. In the Adamic and Apollonian works around this time there is often a gender ambiguity, and a certain eroticism, which this Adam figure embodies.As a painted study, or a revisioning, of the 1969 intaglio, it retains the aura of a Pan figure, or a Satyr. In antiquity these Satyrs expressed qualities of sexuality and power, but also of the religious or sacred properties with which ancient societies imbued nature. They were in essence pagan or pantheistic societies. The elements that are retained in this Preller painting from the earlier intaglio reinforce this impression – the mane of hair and beard, and the belt and neck decorations, for example – both connect the work to the other Apollonian studies and lend it an air of pagan pantheism, elements Preller was aware of and seeking to express in his own way. Another Adam work from the same year as the current painting, Icon Barbare (Adam) (1974), referenced in Berman and Nel,3 evokes the same qualities, though realised in gold leaf on wood. Clearly the most striking aspect of this important work is its startling colour palette in almost kaleidoscopic purples, blues and greens. It is a very different and extreme contrast to the far more muted palettes of the other Adams, and brings it more in line with later paintings like C’est magnifique (1974). This Adam’s eyes are rendered in a powerfully uncanny electric blue, lending the figure an almost reverential and godlike atmosphere. They are completely blue, painted without irises, in an allusion to classical Greek sculpture. Preller imbues his Adam with this timeless quality, as if he is looking into the void, capturing powerfully the ambiguity beween the abyss and a godlike expansiveness. It was certainly telling that Preller deemed it a significant enough work to go to the São Paulo Biennale of 1973, an exhibition for which he only selected five works.

James Sey

Sources:

1 Berman, E. and Nel, K. (2009). Alexis Preller, A Visual Biography: Collected

Images. Johannesburg: Shelf Publishing, p.229.