oil on canvas

Artwork date: circa 1975
Exhibited: Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, 40 Years: Mapping the Route, curated by Neil Dundas, 2006. Warren Siebrits Modern and Contemporary Art, Johannesburg, paintings – past and present, 26 July to 25 August 2006. Used as poster image for the exhibition. Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg, Off the Wall: An 80th Birthday Celebration with Linda Givon, 10 August to 13 November 2016.
Literature: Stevenson, M. (28 January to 14 February 2004). South African Art 1800 – Now. Catalogue. Cape Town: Michael Stevenson Contemporary, illustrated plate 20. Off the Wall: An 80th Birthday Celebration with Linda Givon. Catalogue. 10 August to 13 November 2016, colour illustration on p.24.

(1)

51 x 60 cm

The Linda Givon collection.

Notes:

Walter Battiss became interested in archaeology and rock art as a young boy when his family moved from Somerset East in the Karoo to Koffiefontein, a small farming town in the Free State, in 1917. A family friend accompanied him to see ‘the ancient stones’ and this early experience of indigenous art would have a lifelong influence on his work as an artist. ‘When I came down from the mountains I was articulate and free,’ he later wrote. ‘For I had conversed with the white rocks and the lilac trees, the coucal and rhebuk… The twisted rivers and the endless veld spoke of animate and inanimate space. All this was my peculiar discovery but I had no desire to paint an anecdote about them, but rather to make pictures of them in such a way that I exposed the happy change they had worked within me’ (Battiss, 2005:88).In both form and content, this painting is a clear fulfilment of that desire. With its simplified figures and absence of depth, it is an exuberant pop rendition of the reduced shapes and non-receding perspectival plain of rock art. The combination of figures and text within the same frame evidence the artist’s deep and abiding interest in the relationship of visual sign to verbal meaning and his study of the calligraphic detail of Arabic script, alphabets, hieroglyphic forms and pictographs. A dog and two free-spirited humans inhabit a bright, harmonious place that is elsewhere. Like Gauguin, Battiss often sought to portray humankind living in a utopian state of harmony with nature. Defiantly childlike in its frank style, Melle (is honey) bespeaks the artist’s enchantment with the natural world and connection with other species, systems, processes and phenomena. In its exuberant pantheism, this painting is an unassuming precursor to the evolving field of ecological/ environmental art, which has increasingly become a curatorial focal point as the social and cultural aspects of environmental degradation become more pressing.It was painted in the mid-Seventies, the decade during which Battiss conjured Fook Island – his fantastical, absurdist response to the repressive social realities of apartheid South Africa – and is informed by the same spirit of earth-loving irreverence.

Alexadra Dodd

Sources:

Battiss, W. (2005) Fragments of Africa. In: Walter Battiss: Gentle Anarchist. Johannesburg: Standard Bank Gallery.