King for a Day

 19 May – 9 June 2012                                                           

Opening Saturday 19 May at 14:00          

Exhibition catalogue: please scroll down for on-line version. Printed version available from the gallery

King for a Day is Wilhelm Saayman’s second solo exhibition with GALLERY AOP. The seemingly effortless way in which he expands on the themes, concepts and techniques that he introduced in his remarkably successful exhibition The Wrong Pills in November 2011, belies the complexity of the artworks on this exhibition. 

Saayman creates new ‘texts’ by referencing the style of such artists as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Albert Oehlen, Dana Schutz, and James Havard. He draws on documentary texts, or ‘factual drawings’, by Danzig Baldaev of the Gulag ‘reformatory settlements’ in the former USSR in the late 1940s and early 50s. Or he draws on the anime drawings of Yoshitomo Nara, or the pseudo-bourgeois drawings of Jockum Nordström. He integrates signs of the street in his art. He writes his own cryptic, graffiti-like texts on and in his paintings. He is equally comfortable with the street culture magazine, Juxtapoz, as he is with the outsider art magazine, Raw Vision. His work is a verbal and visual amalgam, akin to the work of another artist to whom Saayman subscribes, namely Dash Snow. Words, signs, texts, all form part of Saayman’s sardonic collage-like paintings. They are bitter, mocking, and scornful in the basic shapes that portray the outré characters of his figures.

In his texts he aims to bring something unorthodox or perverse into connection with ‘naked’ language, or the painting technique of his texts. The pleasure of looking at his paintings resides in the measure of the unsettlement of our historical, cultural, and psychological assumptions. This inevitably brings a crisis to our relation with painting in general. His colours, for example, fall outside the register of the usual colour chart for commercial reproduction. His painting style can best be described as ‘indiscplined’, outside the confines of conventional painting norms and techniques, and seeping through the porous boarders of ‘disciplined’ painting.

 Sometimes he creates hierarchies in his work. Saayman draws on the Weblog of PK, comprising rare book illustrations, graphic art, illuminated manuscripts, lithographs and Renaissance prints, gathered from across “the dustier corners of the internet”, retrieving these materials and referencing them in his work. His aim is to interrogate social stratifications, questioning the order of things that has been taken for granted.

Wilhelm Saayman’s work is positioned outside conventional structures. He is no ordinary structuralist, though. Instead, one can argue he that is a post-structuralist. If structuralism was heroic in its design to master the world of man-made signs and structures, post-structuralism is comic and anti-heroic in its refusal to take such claims seriously.

Wilhelm Saayman is a self-taught artist who has had three solo exhibitions in Johannesburg since 2007, the last one, titled The Wrong Pills, at GALLERY AOP November 2011. He also had a two person exhibition with Lizza Littlewort in Cape Town in 2008 and he participated in group shows in Johannesburg, chief of which was the seminal Draw Links exhibition at GALLERY AOP in October 2010. His work has been acquired by Iziko Gallery in Cape Town and by the Johannesburg Art Gallery. Saayman lives and works in Johannesburg.                  

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