Royal Academy // 24th September – 11th December 2022
These works were pretty monumental. It’s as if they just arrived on the gallery walls. Why wouldn’t they? This blank, cold space needed to be filled with the life works of Kentridge. This sort of artful entropy proliferated in the spaces of the Royal Academy. They took the form of drawing, film-work, tapestry, collage, dance, wearables and documented performance pieces.
Walking through the space and being met with these huge drawings did stir questions of scaleability. Height and reach; Movement up – towards a higher space that would otherwise be untouched. I think in my work I need to utilise space that makes a move above itself. Could my sculptural sticks be used to touch what may have seemed untouchable, an ontological unknown.
2017-18
Charcoal, red pencil and pastel on paper
These works elevated my understanding of colour use. Red in particular. Kentridge uses simplistic lines and arrows as signifiers of separation. Perfect circles frame little areas of the drawing. The shapes seem kind of meaningless, or at least not as visually important as what they are overlapping. It’s as if these red lines are mapping over something thats already so beautiful. Drawing it out of actual existence. Turning the vista into something that can be measured or reassigned. This unwarranted splitting displaces the depicted environment; forcing natural beauty into futile functionality. Imposing a more graph-like, visuality legible language into the foreground of the drawing. The amount of space the red lines take up is minimal but impactful. They are the visual commands of an egotistical mark-maker who’s sketching out blueprints that no one asked for. Of course Kentridge is not said mark-maker, for the true beauty of the work is depicted in his vista. The red lines a crude afterthought. He draws the story of this theft of landscape. Spaces stolen by apartheid.
CONNIE HOPE 
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