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Lionel Smit: Dialogic Cumulus By Jason Rosenfeld

It was a little over a century ago that artists who worked in both painting and sculpture began to favour the former. In previous eras, this had not been the case. Michelangelo and Gian Loreno Bernini, for example, considered themselves sculptors primarily, though both could and did paint. But perhaps Frederic Leighton, working in England in the second half of the nineteenth century, was the first major painter to take up sculpture, producing superb examples of the medium such as Athlete Wrestling with a Python (1877), or The Sluggard (1885). Such works expanded the permutations of form as developed in his paintings, as Edgar Degas would do slightly later in France with The Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, the only sculpture he ever exhibited in public. Modernist artists followed suit. Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Umberto Boccioni, predominantly painters, also produced sculpture of import, designs intimately related to their two-dimensional work. In the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Matisse’s Male Model of c. 1900 hangs next to his bronze Serf (1900-1904), preserving this dialogue (Figure 1), while in a nearby gallery Picasso’s oil, Woman with Pears of the summer of 1909, is displayed adjacent to his bronze of the same model, Fernande Olivier, cast that autumn. Close by, Boccioni’s golden Unique Forms of Continuity in Space of 1913 perpetually stomps forward in a room filled with his candy-coloured and complementary Futurist oils. Mid-century artists continued the trend, as in Barnett Newman’s tantalising and totemic bronze ‘zips’, sprung from

his more familiar colourfield paintings, or the work of Jean Dubuffet, sculptures and paintings that bear equal importance in his oeuvre. Subsequent artists of the Minimalist movement blurred the boundaries of medium and genre, producing paintings that refused to be confined to the wall and ventured into a more physical relationship with viewers, as in Frank Stella’s and Brice Marden’s works. Lionel Smit’s art does not blur boundaries in terms of formal definitions of artistic genres: his sculptures definitively take the form of sculpture, his paintings are definitively paintings. But what his work shares with these modern predecessors lies in the dialogue between the two art forms, in particular an interest in colouration, inventively treating sculptural surfaces as templates for painting, and painted surfaces as opportunities for sculptural fragmentation.

Add to this grand ideas of scale. Smit’s canvases can be 190cm high (over 6 feet), and his sculpted heads can rise 300cm (nearly 10 feet) off their bases. The surfaces of his large oil paintings bear a resemblance to Jenny Saville’s barn door-sized canvases, with their seeming acres of flesh and viscera, works that often feature her unsparing self-image, the latest of which similarly combine freely painted broken colouration with draughtsmanship. In terms of the sculpture, viewers in England may be reminded of Ron Mueck’s self-portrait faces, such as Mask II (2001), works that approach the massive size of heads from Easter Island. But Smit does not pursue Mueck’s level of verisimilitude, instead retaining the traditional surface of bronze and paint, and the template of one particular model’s face.

The blending of techniques across genres is the prime concern of the present show, a display of Smit’s work in multiple media, all bearing visible overlap. His bronzes, made in the traditional lost wax process, are treated as fragmented surfaces subjected to polychromatic experimentation, inside and out. His paintings start with abstract furrows and swaths of colour that establish a base for the subsequently overlaid image of a face or bust – in most cases posed by anonymous models from the Cape Malay community, whose melded ethnicities and histories are a stand-in for the mix of European, African, and Southeast Asian peoples and religions that make up present-day South Africa. Also included are a few finished etchings, prints visually similar to the paintings, but created through gouging and incising metal plates – techniques associated with sculpting.

Smit’s process is adaptive, inventive, and physically engaged. He paints abstract canvases and lets them sit around the studio, ideas gestating, until he is ready to project photographs of the model on them, in a mode that recalls Andy Warhol’s approach to portraiture. But Smit does not work with reproductive processes like silkscreens, as that American pop artist did, instead relying on his hand to transcribe form, and frequently reworking images multiple times, such that colour and line merge, breaking down both. Grey grounds allow him to scatter colour and splinter form, while giving more contrast to hot tones. Smit goes at the canvases with a variety of implements: house paint rollers, homemade india rubber squeegees, big buckets of paint. The overall effect

is one of immediacy in terms of painterly surface, and a vivid presentness conveyed in the model. The broken brushwork is in harmony with the sketched and suggested image – it is the opposite approach to that of Alex Katz’s similarly-sized and equally brightly toned heads that that New York artist has been producing since the 1960s, with their saturated backgrounds and sharply drawn contours.

Similar results occur in the making of the often fragmentary bronzes. These are treated with encaustic, a traditional means of producing polychrome sculpture using pigments suspended in melted wax, automotive paint, which adheres well to metals, Selemix coatings, or industrial sprays. Encaustic calls to mind associations with sculpture that mimicked human flesh, from concoctions on the low end of the spectrum such as those introduced by Madame Tussaud, to fine art dabblings bearing a startling illusionism, as in Mueck’s work, or Los Angeles artist Paul McCarthy’s recent sculpture titled Life Cast (2012-13). However, in Smit’s hands, encaustic does not verge on trompe l’oeil, but flickers to non-naturalistic neon life, dancing across bronze surfaces in layered folds of pure hues. The sculptures are part metallurgy and part chemistry – recent experiments involve using exposure to gas to make a ‘fume patina’, technicolour effects without the mediator of the hand of the artist. Smit is particularly fond of the effects of luminous blues on mustard brown bronze—‘like a very light blue but still turquoise…like it has been under the ocean’, in his words. They have the seductive quality of excavated, ruined, works from antiquity. This is best seen in The Monumental

Fragment, whose scale rivals recovered heads of the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great from the 4th century, or the Olmec civilisation, and which is based on an earlier sculpture.

‘Cumulus’ is Latin for ‘heap’ or ‘accumulation’. Heap, gives a more apt description of the idea of aggregation in Smit’s heavy and colouristic forms, than the more modern associations of ‘cumulus’ with particularly cottony, evanescent clouds. No lightweight confections, in their additive processes, scale, and brazen colour, Smit’s recent work makesa remarkably forcible impact.

Jason Rosenfeld, Ph.D., is Distinguished Chair and Professor of Art History at Marymount Manhattan College, New York. He was co-curator of the exhibition ‘John Everett Millais’ (2007-08: Tate Britain, London; Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, Fukuoka, and Bunkamura Museum, Tokyo, Japan), and the exhibition ‘Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde’ (2012-14: Tate Britain, the National Gallery, Washington, D.C., the Pushkin Museum, Moscow, and the Mori Arts Center, Tokyo). He curated Stephen Hannock: Moving Water, Fleeting Light at Marlborough Fine Art, London (2014). His recent publications include John Everett Millais (Phaidon, 2012) and Pre-Raphaelites (Tate, 2012).

Figure 1

LucuLent Oil on Linen170 x 230cm2014

Detach Oil on Linen120 x 120cm2014

cumuLus Oil on Linen190 x 190cm2014

revive #1 Oil on canvas100 x 100cm2014

cLOuD Oil on Linen190 x 190cm2014

revive #2 Oil on Linen170 x 230cm2014

Dissipate #1 Oil on Linen190 x 190cm2014

Dissipate #2 Oil on Linen190 x 190cm2014

Dissipate #3 Oil on Linen190 x 190cm2014

cumuLate Fragment

Bronzeedition of 640cm high2014

mOnumentaL Fragment

Bronzeedition of 6300cm high2014

untitLeD #1 etching on Zerkall intaglio 280gsm paperedition of 2476 x 66cm2014

untitLeD #2 etching on Zerkall intaglio 280gsm paperedition of 2476 x 66cm2014

Lionel Smit was born in Pretoria, South Africa, in 1982. He started exhibiting straight after attending art school at Pro Arte Alphen Park. He now lives and works in Cape Town and is best known for his contemporary portraiture reinterpreted through monumental canvases and sculptures.

Smit exhibits locally in South Africa where he is considered one of the country’s youngest investment artists. He has recently exhibited in art fairs in Amsterdam, Germany, India, Miami, Monaco, London and Hong Kong. Over the past ten years he has established a substantial international following with works in collections ranging from the Standard Chartered Bank to the Laurence Graff Art Collection at the Graff Delaire wine estate.

Smit’s work has been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London, where it was chosen as the ‘face’ of the BP Portrait Award in 2013. He was recently honoured with a Ministerial Award by the Department of Culture for Visual Art, and a highlight of his career has been the publication of one of his paintings on the cover of a recent Christie’s auction house catalogue.

Selected Solo Exhibitions

2013- Accumulation, Everard Read, Johannesburg- Fragmented, Rook & Raven, London- Formulation, Tokara, Stellenbosch

2012- Compendium, 34FineArt, Cape Town- Accumulation of DisorderUniversity of Stellenbosch Gallery, Stellenbosch

- Strata, Rook & Raven, London

2011- Surface, Artspace, Johannesburg

2010- Submerge, 34FineArt, Cape Town

2009- Relate, Grande Provence, Franschhoek

Selected Group Exhibitions

2013- BP Portrait Award ExhibitionNational Portrait Gallery, London

- Wonder Works Group ExhibitionThe Cat Street Gallery, Hong Kong

- Affordable Art Fair, Hong Kong- Art13 London Art Fair, London- Art Miami Fair, Cynthia Reeves, Miami- Strarta Art FairSaatchi Gallery, Rook & Raven, London

- Metal Work Public Sculpture, Stellenbosch

2012- Winter Exhibition, Everard Read, Johannesburg- Robert Bowman Gallery, India Art Fair, India- Jhb Art Fair, Everard Read, Johannesburg

2011- 34FineArt, ArtMonaco ‘11, Monaco

2010- Cynthia Reeves Projects, Art Miami, USA- We are not Witches, Saatchi Gallery, London- Out of the Office, Kunstmuseum Bochum, Germany

2009- F.A.C.E.T., Charity Auction, Christie’s, London- Group 09, 34FineArt, Cape Town- GesprekUniversity of Stellenbosch Gallery, Stellenbosch

Qualifications and Awards

2013- Ministerial Award from Department of Art and

Culture for Visual Art, Western Cape Government- Visitor’s Choice Award, BP Portrait Award, National Portrait Gallery, London

2009- Merit Award, Vuleka, Sanlam Art Competition, Cape Town

2008- Achievement Award, Pro Arte School of Arts

2000- First prize in the MTN Art Colours Awards of Gauteng

1999/2000- Best painting student Pro Arte School of Arts

Catalogues

- Formulation LIONEL SMIT, Tokara, Stellenbosch 2013- Accumulation LIONEL SMIT,

Everard Read, Johannesburg 2013- Strata LIONEL SMIT, Rook & Raven, London 2012- Surface LIONEL SMIT, Artspace, Johannesburg 2011- We are not Witches, Saatchi Gallery, London 2011- Submerge LIONEL SMIT, 34FineArt, October 2010- F.A.C.E.T. (catalogue cover), Christie’s, October 2009- Residue, Grande Provence Gallery, October 2009- Group therapy, Sandton Civic Gallery, 2005- Pretoria, Everard Read Gallery, November 2004

Collections

- Ellerman Contemporary- Standard Chartered Bank- Laurence Graff- Rand Merchant Bank- European Investment Bank- Johannesburg City Council- Saronsberg Wine Estate- Grainvest Futures- Delaire Graff Wine Estate- South African Embassy, Nigeria- Parkdev- Johann Jacobs Museum