Van Schalkwyk: Through the looking glass

It is the painting in the corner that hits you in the solar plexus with an impact that feels visceral, as you enter the gallery. Rough at the edges and without a clear shape or traditional format, Strange Prayer for a Lover is a piece in oil on Belgian linen that beckons to you mysteriously. This is the work of Jaco van Schalkwyk, a painter immersed in the complex beauty that a brush on canvas can create.

His solo exhibition, Smoke and Mirrors, on at the Arts Association of Pretoria Gallery comprises small and large works, figure compositions and landscapes, but the smaller works initially bypass your sensibilities as the great landscapular portals of mystery, installed with mirrors and embraced by foliage, seduce you. It’s like you’re Alice in a wonderland that has no, as yet, clear narrative, but it is too enticing to bypass.

Van Schalkwyk took the scenic route to become a career painter. He studied the histories at university — art history, anthropology and archaeology — and learnt his painting skill through the almost sacrosanct approach of apprenticeship, under SA painter, Marie Vermeulen Breedt over many years.

His approach to his art has thus been slow, quiet and deep like that of Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer, or dark and evolved like that of the German Romanticists. Or both, mixed together in a way that is uniquely Van Schalkwyk. Intense in its focus. Overwhelming in its sense of depth, detail and complexity.

Eleven years ago, he landed in the German-owned island of Sylt for a residency. The concept of honing your landscape art while living on an island for a period of sacred time, sounds Edenic, but it was complicated by pragmatics. It represented a turnaround in his gaze that brought the power of the monochrome to his brush. It was winter. The light was grey. His palette became — and remained — tonal.   

In this exhibition, you will see a lot more than simple images committed to canvas. It’s a show about how the eye can betray ... or is it the heart? A show about cleverness in the medium and application, as well as the thinking, but one devoid of self-consciously slick one-liners. The body of work on show features a series of small paintings telling the legend of Narcissus — the beautiful boy who fatally fell in love with his own image — as its narrative heart. It’s a heart embraced by large works which otherwise convey majestic mystical portals between this world and another.

You will return to this exhibition in waves. You will come, at first and get knocked off your equilibrium by the large landscapes. Then you will look again, and see the Narcissus works. Then, you will breathe, and return to see it all, in cohesion. And once you have imbibed what Van Schalkwyk is saying to you, you will realise also his immense skill in understanding the power of scale. The landscapes are not building-sized. The largest is about 2m in width. But the proportion of elements within them give an understanding of monumentality that takes on values of a biblical moment.

This exhibition is as much about being in the world as it is about pushing your nose against the proverbial glass to see what another world may hold for you, and as such, it offers thimbles full of danger, in a mythical sense. Stand too close to any of Van Schalkwyk’s incredibly detailed abstracted landscapes, juxtaposed as they are to mirrors on the wall, and you may slip through the cracks and gaps that kaleidoscopically open up, and vanish into never more or into something even more extraordinary.

But stand at depth, and you can see the beautiful intimate, skilful thinking, an approach unabashed in its ‘old fashioned’ nature, that holds fast to the rules of painterly tradition, based on the veracity of the eye in tandem with the heart, in place since the European Renaissance more than 500 years ago. Think Albrecht Dürer in the quality of detail which attests to Van Schalkwyk’s pieces.

And while you are standing and looking at the work, picture the artist himself, making it. These are not flamboyant and self-conscious gestures cast out into the public eye; rather it is poetically concentrated detail knitting a world together. There are no crude displays of showmanship here. Simply the ineffable. And great skill.

Van Schalkwyk, a contemporary career artist in an art world amply supported by visual technology of every stripe you can think of, doesn’t make art that imitates photographs. Photographs may be his reference points, alongside life models and visual memory, but the work he makes is never allowed to slip into that loophole which makes the lay person enthuse about being unable to distinguish between a painting and a photograph. And that is its edge. Eminently legible as a painting for the sake of being a painting, deliciously layered with depth of meaning and space, Van Schalkwyk’s landscapes are both abstract and traditional, seductive and mysterious, but oozing with all the idiosyncrasies that give it life.

• Smoke and Mirrors is at the Arts Association of Pretoria Gallery in Pretoria until April 6.