A Car Wreck in Paradise
Looking and Being Looked at in the Work of Deborah Poynton
Looking at a work by Deborah Poynton is personally an overwhelming experience. Each painting is like a magical window. One can both look through it and into another world. Yet it is also like a mirror, a disturbing reflection of the reality we find ourselves in the midst of. Meeting our mirror image is rarely reassuring, unless it is in some kind of affirmative Instagram way, where the illusion of an ideal world and our own idealised identity remain intact. But this is not the way it is in Deborah Poynton’s art. At first glance the world in her paintings is beguiling and brilliantly executed, but appearances can be deceptive. Realism is merely the artist’s seductive means of enticing us into the narrative of the painting. And once we are inside, the skeletons come tumbling out of the closet and we stand face to face with the greatest demon in any story: ourselves.
I write having known Deborah Poynton for many years. We first met in her former home in Simon’sTown, a suburb of Cape Town, in 2002. This was first of many meetings, and it has been an incredible privilege to follow her development since. Deborah Poynton has her atelier at home, and her friends and family often model for her paintings. My many visits to her different homes are part and parcel of my experience of her work. Visiting the artist is to step halfway into the world of her works.
In order to paint, the artist has to partially block out the sharp, South African light from her atelier. I talk to her behind dark curtains holding a large cup of tea. The special combination of the calm, dark wood of the furniture and gentle attention gives everything, including the cup in my hand, a different body and weight. Deborah Poynton is kindness incarnate. I relax completely in her company, yet she registers – she sees – everything.
It is not difficult to see the legacy of 17th-century Dutch masters or even some 19th-century British painters in Deborah Poynton’s works. The joy at the possibility of the painting and the interactionbetween nature, people and the manmade radiate from every single work. For me Deborah Poyntonis an entirely contemporary artist. Her meditations on place and non-place, dream and reality, attraction and rejection belong firmly in the present. But she drives the narrative of her works forward through the classical masters’ intelligent placing of objects and the relationship betweenthem, creating a symbolism that is both seductive and ominous.
Take Interior with Red Tub (1998), which was part of my MA graduation exhibition at Johannesburg Art Gallery in 2003. The title of the exhibition was Show Me Home, a journey into the domestic and private sphere through works by different artists. Deborah Poynton’s exceptional 2x2m painting shows a bed where what looks like a wedding dress lies. The fabric of the bed and dress are lustrous and shiny, and occupy a large part of the painting. In the background is the view of a garden or forest, apparently in autumn. There are no leaves on the trees. In the shade to the right of the painting a naked male figure stands looking at us. The direct eye contact with the viewer anticipates numerous later works depicting nude figures.
On the floor is the titular piece, the mysterious red washtub. It stands out among the otherwise light and delicate tones of the work. Together with the open suitcase on the floor, the teapot and biscuits on the table, the tube of cream, all everyday items heavy with significance and underlining the intensity of the meeting in the work and between the work and the viewer as we ask ourselves where the bride is, and wonder what that cheap, plastic basin is doing in the middle of what we have to presume is a romantic scene. Are we already dealing with morning sickness and a metaphor for blood? Has the purity symbolised by the white wedding dress already been lost and flung ontothe bed like the memory of fleeting love? Or have we already reached the autumn of life represented by the background, making the entire scene a long flashback to some kind of climax in life many years ago? If so, who cannot recognise themselves in such a story?
The placing of the objects powering the narrative is also present in the work Safehouse (2003). Here we look into a living-room scene. In the foreground is a child – Deborah Poynton has painted her own children in numerous works. This one looks like her son Wilder, who at the time must have been around four, although here he is painted as a marble-like figure. The child becomes an ornament on a par with the plant and heavily ruched curtains. It is, however, the open wardrobe full of clothes and the room’s inexplicable oppressiveness that creates the drama. Is this really a safehouse, or rather its opposite? What skeletons are hidden in the closet? Why has time come to a standstill, and why are there cleaning utensils next to the crystal decanter on the table? What is it that has to be cleaned and disposed of?
The objects in Deborah Poynton’s works seem both real and strangely unreal to me. Like objects in a dream, they mean something both as the objects they represent and because of the atmosphere they immerse us in. The relationship to the physical world, the correlation between the idea of things and their material manifestation, is a major theme in art history. In the Nordic tradition artists worked hard throughout the 19th century to translate what they perceived as the truth of nature into art. Art was to be authentic and heartfelt, yet enough of an ideal to sustain Victorian demands of moral superiority and a safe distance from the observed scenes of nature. Deborah Poynton does the opposite. Her works are created against the background of intense observation of the world around her. But the placing of objects and people in her paintings do not produce peace and harmony. On the contrary. They take us to secretive spaces that activate our fantasies and imagination.
That we as viewers play a key role in Deborah Poynton’s works was obvious to me when showing the work Candidates in Copenhagen in 2006. The work is life-size, and depicts two naked women and two naked men standing in some kind of tawdry venue. And it shocked the public! Not only are the people in the painting full-frontal, they also look us unashamedly in the eye. We have an age-old tradition of observing from a safe distance in our part of the world. Just think of zoos, world exhibitions, and pin-ups through the ages. Even on Instagram today we can look at beautiful people from a safe distance on safe ground. With Candidates Deborah Poynton does the opposite. The title alone: ‘Candidates’ for what? A beauty competition? Hardly. But then again, why not? There theystand, beautiful and strong. But first and foremost they throw our judgemental gaze right back at us. Scrutinising the four of them, we too are under scrutiny. As are the marks left by our underwear, the scars on our stomachs, and our surplus flesh. In the encounter with these blatantly observing people the artist manages to return our gaze and hold a merciless mirror before us, seeming to ask: ‘So,what about you?’.
We find ourselves in a Dorian Gray world of the picture and the viewer, between the painted figure and real people. It is no longer clear who is in control. Personally I love the glass lamps on the ceiling. The wannabe crystal intended to lend a touch of glamour to a cheap interior. The same clash between organic nakedness and industrial surfaces is repeated in the artist’s self-portrait with her first husband. We meet the two in the same full-frontal position, although this time in theirunderwear. In confronting the viewer, the same kind of thing happens: we are simultaneously disarmed and mirrored. By placing her main figures in familiar, public spaces, the artist emphasises our vulnerability and exposed position. Simultaneously strong and attractive, vulnerable and exposed, we are on display to each other. Loneliness is a recurrent theme for Deborah Poynton. We are together, yet separate. Separate, yet still together.
In recent years Deborah Poynton has returned to nature as motif and resonance chamber for her works. Still with carefully placed objects and the exchange of the gaze as the driving force of the visual narrative. And with industrial motifs like planes and cruise ships as symbolic and contrasting elements within it. The monumental 11-panel Arcadia is a principal work by the artist, a masterful journey into the human condition which she, as a white South African with European roots and a US education, is well placed to address. Darkness looms, the origins of which fade out of sight in the deep, quiet calm of the primeval forest. But what is a wrecked car doing in the midst of thisGarden of Eden?
If like me you grew up in the Danish countryside in the 1980s, wrecked cars in people’s gardens arenot a rare sight. I imagine the same is true of parts of South Africa. What is strange is the kind of pride people attach to these cars. Like an old cherished jacket, which despite being threadbare one cannot bear to part with. Because it represents the dream of something better – of masculinity, speed and drive. That the car now stands here in Arcadia, overgrown and falling apart, is not just a modern take on the ruin in 18th-century painting. It is not simply a reminder of times past. It also represents the hope of rebirth, of starting over. So we leave it there instead of moving it, let it stand as a monument to the life we once had. And may one day have again.