KZNSA Gallery

KZNSA Gallery presents ‘A Glass Darkly’

A Glass Darkly

Date

02/08/2024 –
25/08/2024

Adelle van Zyl

My paintings consider how we pay attention to the world around us, and limitations in our ability to see and understand things as they are. I suggest that we can grasp the world around us by carefully absorbing intricate details and singular moments. My work is personal. It speaks of absence and alone-ness, it is a tender yet critical look at my heritage and its cultural spaces. Rural churches, abandoned farmhouses and dejected inner-city buildings go unnoticed but captured in dusk’s oblique, filtered sunlight, they are transformed into magical, meaningful scenes.

Liminal interior spaces become loaded expressions of the intricacy and frailty of the human psyche. In the buildings I explore, mid-century pressed glass windows serve to obscure rather than to reveal, as light is allowed to enter but vision of the outside world is blocked. I am intrigued by the dualities of windows and mirrors, those thin edges between the real and its reflection, exterior and interior, the known and the hidden… My technical explorations of the theme and application of paint reflect this duality. These paintings range from thinly layered translucent images revealing the stark geometry of architectural spaces, to sensuously thick impasto abstractions. Through this intimate and intense meditation on interior details, I aim to transport you to quiet, introspective spaces where you can pause, absorb, and reflect.

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then we will see everything with perfect clarity.
The Holy Bible: 1 Corinthians 13:12. (KJV & NIT)

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