For artist Deborah Poynton there is no difference between a paradise landscape, a decrepit body or litter. Beauty is an elastic concept. The Drents Museum shows her paintings.
The ugly is beautiful and the beautiful is ugly, and kitsch is not kitsch. It undermines all those constructions.
Confusing – kitchen or studio? The spectacular view over Table Mountain in Cape Town is undoubtedly too distracting for a studio. But the canvas against the wall suggests otherwise, although a sink and stove contradict that conclusion. Everything also looks too tidy. Where are the squeezed paint tubes, the caked-on coffee mugs? It is also a bit dark. But there is a floor lamp, aimed at the painted canvas, a large canvas, two by eight feet, with a sky, a landscape and in the foreground a dirty white dog on a pink blanket with a clump of nursing puppies. Everything painted with rare detail. In the adjoining room hang two more unfinished canvases of similar size. And look, there’s a red trolley with a palette and brushes. This must be her studio.
Confusion is key to the work of South African artist Debora Poynton. The oeuvre, of which a selection of 57 works can be seen in the Drents Museum, goes against the trend that art must be engaged, that painting is outdated, that a cryptic concept is overpowered. Poynton makes realistic art. She gets her inspiration from the old masters, Vermeer, Van Eijck, Memling. Eurocentric, she was often told – no compliment in South Africa, with its long history of colonialism and apartheid. ‘Realism became my specialism, and that was not appreciated everywhere. But so many artists painted the black experience. I found that uncomfortable; it’s not up to me to comment on that from my perspective,” she says, white, female, middle-aged, middle-class.
We have two conversations. The first takes place at the Stevenson Gallery in Cape Town, where the staff has hung some of her small works in the interview room. For example, we look at a nature scene with a blue-haired troll, a portrait of an elderly man, and a penis rimmed by a lover. The troll is disruptive; the man’s skin looks eerily translucent; and the dangling penis is anything but erotic. Elsewhere in the gallery, a large still life with two dogs, a table with empty plates, a flower in a vase, a porcelain figurine of three dancing girls and a pink iron hangs next to an ironing board cover depicting a tropical beach in bright green and bright blue .