Title: Deep Pool (from the series Colonial Landscape)
Medium: Charcoal and pastel on paper
Signed and dated in 1996
Framed: 120cm x 160cm
This museum-quality artwork has been exhibited at several USA national galleries from 1996 to 2003. Starting off at the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg it travelled to Washington, New York, Chicago, Houston and Los Angeles, before being exhibited at the South African National Gallery in 2003.
Colonial Landscapes is inspired by a nineteenth century publication, Africa and its Explorers (c.1907), a two-volume account of expeditions made by Livingstone, Burton and others. Deep Pool is a large, polished drawing extracted from the original detailed engravings of exotic Africa’s natural splendour as depicted by the explorers that recounted the colonial past.
These drawing are quite different to the earlier roughed-up landscapes of Johannesburg and dystopic city edges that served as backdrops for Kentridge’s stop frame animation films.
Kentridge recounts: [It was a] pleasure of working with the ‘code’ of engraved marks and playing with the mediations from raw veld to the sketchbook of the traveller, back to London to the professional engraving shop where the view would be re-dramatised, and engraved, to a hundred years on, looking at these now yellow pages. The new red marks are both beacons erected in the landscape and the surveyor’s theodolite markings of the image in the viewfinder.
The viewer shares scrutinising the land, through a viewfinder, but division and exploitation of the idyllic landscape is made evident by the cadmium red markings that “bruise” the landscape. Objects such as a megaphone, distant goal posts and a diving board are motifs that often reoccur in the work of William Kentridge.
