Constraints

9 – 30 November 2013
Please join us for the opening on Saturday 9 November at 14:00

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue

Looking at Jaco van Schalkwyk’s latest body of work, one is compelled to ask whether the work is about abstract colour field painting, or about colourful abstractions, or even about a process of abstracting colour from the picture plane. All of these connotations of the word abstraction, whether used as adjective, noun or verb, signal the original Latin meaning of the word, abstrahere, to withdraw. And the question then is whether these abstractions signal a withdrawal from the physical to the metaphysical, or from the representational to the conceptual nature of reality. In terms of the title of the exhibition, the question then becomes whether he is constraining colour, or creating colour constraints, or representing constrained colour fields. In addition, the fact that most of the work is done on paper, signals that (in the same manner as much of contemporary drawing is theorized presently) it is about cognition, about concept, about precept, even about dictum.

Jaco van Schalkwyk received his BFA in Drawing from the Pratt Institute, New York in 2003. With Carl Hancock Rux, he developed the acclaimed opera-oratorio Mycenaean as visiting artist at CalArts in 2005 and 2006, culminating in an engagement as part of the prestigious Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2006. He returned to South Africa, and to drawing, in 2008. Constraints is his third solo exhibition at GALLERY AOP.

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