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| WILLIAM KENTRIDGE | |
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| William Kentridge arouses strong
empathy in the spectator with his series of animated works. Kentridge employs
narrative elements, graphics and music to generate fascination and particular
emotional involvement. He uses a technique similar to the traditional animation
process. Kentridge hand-draws all images with charcoal and pastel, but instead
of drawing each movement on a separate sheet he realizes the images always
on the same sheet of paper. He uses a key frame in which he erases single
elements, then re-draws them, creating hence a new frame. In this way the
figures and stories the artist draws always emerge from the traces of the
previous drawing creating a unique and evocative atmosphere. Time, change
and absence seam to be the constant themes of Kentridge’s work, themes
which metaphorically are represented by the continuous alternation between
erasure and redrawing. The setting of the stories presented is South Africa
during Apartheid. Kentridge chooses a set of symbols and figures that can
be found in all his videos of this period: an African woman, Soho, a middle-aged
businessman, Felix, an alter ego of the artist himself, the African landscape,
a smoking factory, African songs, water, a fish or a mirror. The characters
evoke an emotional and political struggle that reflects the life of many South Africans during the years of racial separation, but at the same time we recognise recurring themes and the symbolic elements, including death, existential solitude, love and the greatness of nature which are born out of the artist’s poetic imagination and inner being, but easily come to form part of shared emotional baggage and understanding that becomes universal. All elements are in a constant flow, bodies morphs into landscapes, animals turn into objects; everything seams to be in a continuous state of transition revealing a free flow of associations. The animations seam to follow similar patterns as the brain does right before falling asleep, letting images emerge from its memory in loose sequences and blending them into each other to let them disappear again. “My drawings don’t start with a ‘beautiful mark’. It has to be a mark of something out there in the world. It doesn’t have to be an accurate drawing, but it has to stand for an observation, not something that is abstract, like an emotion.” (William Kentridge) |
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