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Traveling The Margins
by Kai Lossgott
You are watching this scene in the dark, standing at a distance. You are aware that you are alone. Ahead of you is a light that both attracts and repels. It offers intimacy, upholds distance. It attracts because you need to rest, it repels because midnight visitors are seldom welcome and any stranger in the dark could be your killer. The painter, night and light collude to heighten this drama. They reveal and conceal. They edit out excessive detail. They veil. They cloud. They simplify. Invisibly, they open a space for contemplation. The true vulnerability they reveal is an emotional one.
Does the road wind uphill all the way? Yes, to the very end. Will the day’s journey take the whole long day? From morn to night, my friend. But is there for the night a resting-place? A roof for when the slow dark hours begin. May not the darkness hide it from my face? You cannot miss that inn. Christina Rosetti (1830 – 1894) from “Up-hill”, written 1856
Serfontein’s symbolic stations of resting and waiting evoke a certain romantic nostalgia. Read in the context of Rosetti’s Romantic poem and middle class Victorian sensibilities, the light in the night is welcoming, and to her symbolises the possibility of eternal rest in the afterlife. In this reading, Serfontein’s paintings suggest a hopeful intimacy, a place for the traveler to rest his weary bones. Yet they also contain a more sinister dimension.
In the psychological climate of contemporary South African society, and in a global-American context obsessed with terrorism and surveillance, they suggest another kind of death. They are places of wariness, heightened suspiciousness. A bright light outside a house is more likely to be understood as a repellant, a clear signal for intruders to stay away. A petrol filling station at night with nobody around exposes motorists to attack. A dark, empty car by the side of a dirt road can hold both the victim of a robbery, or the perpetrators waiting to pounce. They are places contemporary South Africans could come to at their peril, and places they dare not stay long.
The artist has remarked that his work is not about the specifics of place. Rather, it is about psychological space. “Landscape painting is an emotionally loaded genre. It makes space for the sociopolitical because you find yourself here [in a certain place]. In painting a landscape you make an incision into a sociopolitical space, owning a piece of land.” A large part of collective Afrikaner identity has historically been an almost visceral connection to the landscape. All apron strings cut from its various colonial motherlands, Afrikaans identity finds itself in a rootless space of non-belonging, a space filled with a need to make ties with the earth. The viewer in Serfontein’s nightscapes is an outsider, a new arrival on uncertain ground. He says this nostalgic connection to the land happens on a level that is almost “vreemd”, an Afrikaans word which can mean both “strange” as well as “foreign”. You arrive as a blank canvas, and the presence of the South African landscape “Maak goeters in jou oop”, “Opens things up in you”, makes you a friend, stranger or victim.
The artist’s work displays a wonder of the land, of the night with its mysteries, akin to the sentiments expressed in the German Romanticist poet Novalis’ “Hymns to the Night”, a seminal text of German Romanticism. Serfontein’s technique achieves a quality of crepuscular light similar to that of the German Romanticist painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774 – 1840). Yet instead of glorifying nature in the vein of this historical movement in reaction to the rapid urbanisation of the industrial revolution, Serfontein pays homage to fragments of the human built environment, everyday unembellished products of modern architecture.
Serfontein’s haunts are places of twilight and transition - the lone house, night-time shop, petrol station or abandoned car. In between leaving and arrival, they denote remaining, facing the world as it is. They allude to a pause in the passing of time, a pause in an atmosphere so quiet that it becomes a meaningful moment of contemplation, a moment that, perhaps more than one of physical threat, is one of emotional vulnerability. The artist has remarked that he finds it fascinating that people in our times still stop to look at paintings. “It requires deep delving from the viewer. It takes a special person. Stopping to look at a painting is an act of self-confrontation through internalising an image. Part of the process required to view my paintings is to stand still.” In this stillness, a dialogue takes place with silence and the unspeakable. The paintings draw you to feelings of isolation and loneliness. They initiate you into a landscape of contemplation in which the uncomfortable truths of life are bound to surface in the back of the mind. Sooner or later, you will be face-to-face with death, if only the thought of it. These are places that heighten the presence of time passing and both the transience and ambiguity of human life.
As a body of work, in these dark and sparse landscapes of paradox, you are reduced to a pilgrim with an uncertain god. They heighten the modern human sense of relentless travel, seeking to overcome the primal sense of loss and the fear of the unknown. Serfontein has said that his collectors often confide that they relate to his paintings through experiences of melancholy and loss. Rosetti, who alternated between frequent religious ecstasies and suicidal depressions, writes that she fears that the darkness she finds herself traveling in may hide the possible salvation of the inn from her face. “You cannot miss that inn”, she writes, perhaps hopeful, perhaps desperate for its illumination. ‘Traveling the Margins’ carries the inherent struggle between the abject, being stunned in the face of horror, and the sublime, transfixion in the face of beauty. These unspeakable experiences are historically associated with Romanticism.
It is in the such moments at which life’s relentless progress is interrupted, such as moments of loss, illness and longing, that we may learn, as Rosetti wishes, to see in the dark. It is in this space that we attempt to construct meaning and make sense. We exist for a moment in an unspecified time, in a temporary dwelling place bathed in light – Rosetti’s mysterious inn, Serfontein’s 24h filling stations, closed shops and locked houses – in the presence of life’s enigma, in which we do not know if we belong. In the silence, we become conscious that, beyond being, we are becoming – an idea often expressed by transcendental psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung, no stranger to the dreamscape and attempting to resolve the conflicts of the psyche.
The journey might be “long” and “uphill”, and on it one might often be conscious of “the very end”, as the Romantic poet puts it. Serfontein urges us to stop along the way. The longer one spends in a place, the more familiar it becomes. With familiarity, fear subsides and might reveal itself as paranoia. Ultimately, the ‘Traveling the Margins’ series attempts to instil calm in the viewer despite all threats. It opens up a place and a time in which, in the silent company of the artist, as he suggests, “‘I am not alone’ and ‘Everything will be okay’.” One of the journey’s many destinations is a place of healing.
