RICHARD SMITH SOLO EXHIBITION : RAPID EYE MOVEMENT
RICHARD SMITH SOLO EXHIBITION : RAPID EYE MOVEMENT : 6th MARCH – 2nd APRIL 2014 : at EBONY, 67 LONG STREET, CAPE TOWN
Media Release
Quality and originality are the key elements at Ebony, Loop Street, Cape Town where Richard Smith will have his solo exhibition Rapid Eye Movement from Thursday 6th March until Wednesday 2nd April. A highly established and recognised artist for over 40 years, Smith has been extensively exhibited in South Africa, UK, USA, Greece and Sweden. Gallery hours are Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm and Saturday 9.30am to 1pm. The opening on the 6th March is from 5pm to 9pm at 67 Loop Street.
‘This is an exciting start to 2014 for us and follows on from our participation at the Cape Town Art Fair’, says Ebony’s curator Marc Stanes. ‘Smith’s multi panelled composites on paper utilize his love of the visually daring. There is a pent up energy at work here, a sensory overload, a marriage of the conscious and unconscious. Frantic individual figures are released into exquisitely beautiful and small individual oil panels, dripping with renaissance quality. There is a master at work here, a singularly unique voice.’
Resonating with the masters before him, Richard Smith quotes
Leonardo da Vinci and Picasso …
‘Look at certain walls dirtied with stains or with a mixture of different kinds of stones. If you have to invent some scene you will be able to see in them a resemblance to various landscapes adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys and hills. You will also be able to see various battles and figures in quick movements, and strange expressions on faces and costumes and an infinite number of things which you can then reduce into separate, well-conceived form’… (da Vinci McM no. 76 and cf. no. 93).
Says Smith; ‘When I first read this passage from Leonardo’s rules of painting, I was elated because I do this all the time.
My preferred media, charcoal for drawing and oil paint for painting provide the platform in which I can see ‘various battles and figures in quick movements’. The oil paint or charcoal applied quickly, open a gate and dictate to me what is already there. Picasso said one must not seek … only find.
I do not set out to paint ‘Van in a Red Fedora’ or ‘Lennon in Heaven’. They become who they are after the fact. In my paintings, surfaces and textures are more important to me than the scene depicted. Some of the paintings can take up to three months to complete – obviously not continuously, but over time I re-visit them again and again. The same process applies to the multi-panel charcoal drawings with the exception that I can remove my marks or add to them ad infinitum. The characters that appear to me range from the whimsical to the plainly bizarre to the classical rendering of the human face or figure.
I have entitled this exhibition ‘Rapid Eye Movement’ because as a viewer of these multi-panel works and oil on panel installations I want to see the work as a whole, as a conglomerate, but in the next instant I want to see many things. The small oils on panel are spawned from the larger composites on paper and in a sense freed from the ‘constraints’ of the multi-panel format.’
Curator Marc Stanes is one of the owners of Ebony in Cape Town and Franschhoek. An internationally exhibited photographer he curates the Fine Art Collection for Ebony. Marc also is the Director of the Museum of Modern Art in Equatorial Guinea, which is actively involved in working with young and established artists from across the continent.
For more information about the exhibition contact Gernot Achleitner at Ebony on 021 424 9985 or email gernot@ebonydesign.co.za
Ends
PUBLISHED BY DK EXPRESSIONS™
Issued on behalf of Richard Smith and Marc Stanes,
Ebony, 67 Long Street
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For media information, photos and interviews please contact
Berniece Friedmann 021 434 4951 / 082 892 5877
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RICHARD SMITH BIOG
Born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1947, Richard Smith has had a varied career as a cartoonist, social commentator, illustrator and fine artist. In the late 1960s, he studied Graphic Design at the Johannesburg School of Art, and in 1968 began his career as a cartoonist for the Sunday Times, subsequently contributing to publications such as Punch, the Financial Mail, the Harvard Business Review, Leadership Magazine, the London Underground Press and the Rand Daily Mail. In 1980 and again in 1984, he won the Standard Bank Cartoonist of the Year award. He was also involved with the production of politically-oriented animation for BBC television, and, in 1977 served as court artist for the American Broadcasting Corporation at the inquest into the death of Steve Biko in Pretoria.
Smith’s fine art career began in 1971 with a solo show of drawings at the Arts Theatre Club, London. He began painting in the mid 1980s and exhibited in a major Johannesburg gallery, primarily as a painter of abstract expressionist landscapes. In 1990, while a Resident at the Cite Internationale des Arts in Paris, Smith began making oil on paper works, some of which were torn up and re-worked as collage elements. It was at this time, too, that his fascination with charcoal’s malleability began.
Smith has exhibited widely both in South Africa and abroad. In 1985 and 1988 he was represented on the prestigious Cape Town Triennial, and on numerous exhibitions in Johannesburg. He has also participated in many group shows in Europe, such as Galerie Viktoria, Gottenberg, Sweden (1999); Expo 2000, Hanover, Germany; the Omma Center for Contemporary Art in Chania, Crete (2002) and the Jill Yakas Gallery, Athens, Greece (2003). Smith has also received private commissions, including a portrait of King Mswati of Swaziland, and portraits of seven Southern African heads of state.
After living for a year in Greece in 2002, Smith returned to South Africa to take up the curatorship of the inaugural Brett Kebble Awards. Smith has been living and working in the Western Cape, and held a solo, sold-out exhibition at Constitution Hill in Johannesburg. Solo exhibitions were to follow in Johannesburg in 2007, 2008, 2010 and 2012, and in Cape Town in 2009 and 2012.
RICHARD SMITH SOLO EXHIBITION : RAPID EYE MOVEMENT
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