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Urban Tension
From Artslink.co.za
Serfontein’s success lies not only in his mastery over his chosen medium but his ability to translate his emotive view of the world and its landscapes in a way that leaves his viewers both uneasy yet compelled. These places are all familiar but are not designed to be seen, making voyeurs out of the most innocent of viewers. The paintings on Urban Tension depict a series of urban landscapes such as parking garages, underground tunnels and emergency rooms.
In response to the oft-debated notion that painting is an obsolete form of art in works of contemporary or conceptual art, writer and artist JW Stewart comments that “there is something in painting that notions of cognition, ideas of symbol formation, categorisations of noumena or what-have-you cannot account for. Taken apart from the content of representation, the application of pigment suspended in a medium onto a surface is so basic and direct an activity that people will always find a reason to come back to it. It is its own form of thinking, sometimes purely visual, even purely tactile, in any event as pure and unmediated as it gets.”
Pictured mostly at night, dimly lit and ominous, these are liminal spaces - places that are conduits to other places - rendered in exquisite detail. Designed for the convenience of people, yet devoid of any signs of life, these images evoke a sense of desolation that commands us to look at the isolation and underlying danger of an urban lifestyle. Although these spaces are universal, the flavour of this fear is distinctly South Africa.
Says Serfontein: “Masses of people sometimes rush through here. […] I stand still for hours in spaces we are not conscious of, and with this waiting, the inherent qualities of the space begin to resonate in me.”
In his catalogue essay, Kai Lossgot remarks that these works are “standing still at the portal implies a hidden potential for action. Here, Serfontein seeks refuge, when fear should be propelling him forward.”
“Standing still in these areas of immanent physical uncertainty is an existential act of will. It is reclamation of living spaces. The symbolic anticipation of these places thrills the artist, in what the French poet Henri Michaux calls “the horrible inside-outside / that real space is”. The artist remarks that the first time he looked through a wide-angle lens, "it was as if the image swept me off my feet”. The distorted perspective he explores in this way triggers an emotional unbalance, it heightens the uncertainty concealed within the transitory spaces he is drawn to.”
