FOX PRETORIUS

ON THE ROAD TO WONDER: THE ART OF FOX PRETORIUS

by David Gibson 

The paintings and monotypes of Fox Pretorius present both humanity and phenomena in nature as ambiguously altered by perspective and filled with dramatic portent. Each of Pretorius’ print series reflects random elements in which experiences and sensory events reduce to a certain range of impressions that result in either abstract or suggestively pictorial elements. The mood evoked by these works is demonstrably eerie, as if generated specifically by the process of formal depiction. Motion, mood, self-alienation, and being intensely overwhelmed by the psychological demands of everyday working life—all of these take on a dramatic and symbolic role in Pretorius’ works. Ordinary structures are transformed into grotesque settings. They feel like images from the dramatic backdrop of an epic play, with gods and monsters all around, and foreboding structures that have just emerged from the shadows.

The transformation of the everyday from its commonplace appearance into a dream state is the purview of the artist. The stripping away of layers of normality until the primal and mythical forms emerge intact, this is the magic of poetry and art. To seek the symbolic is natural to the artist, and every form that emerges from his imagination takes on a certain breathless portent. The less these forms appear realistic, the less the qualities of the story they tell can be easily ascertained.  

Each of Pretorius’ series evokes a different layer of these imagined territories, perhaps gratuitously evoked from the mass of men and women populating the commercial and residential hubs where the artist has lived. If art has a primary use as a reflection of what is most immediately real, to reflect and symbolize it, then the mass of the working populace as individuals and masses of characters, and of the mass spaces they inhabit, if only transitionally, create a mirror for the artist.

Pretorius’ paintings are currently contained in a single series which he calls his ‘Pendoring Paintings’. The word refers to a type of tree common to his native South Africa. Reaching to a height of 40 feet, they are regularly covered with yellow flowers but also, amid the flowers and dense foliage, are a mass of long, hard, very sharp thorns. It’s said that where these trees are most common, they serve as a means of separating different territories, for the brambles represent a symbolic barrier. Yet for a young man with budding artistic tendencies, they must have presented a very compelling way to view the world. They have entered Pretorius’s visual language and have stayed relevant to the degree of meaning he actively implies: impressions from repetitive experience to transcend the overwhelming material and visceral demands of everyday engagement in a highly competitive urban environment, dynamically charged by the migrant populations that have transformed it from an agrarian to a metropolitan culture. The creative individual, especially one who has experienced displacement from homelands distant and alien to their current locale, is apt to experience a pressing degree of hardship that is best ameliorated and strengthened by reference to imagery carrying a strong aesthetic impact. They present as a lattice that both breaks down the gradations of any distinct form seen through them and generates an interior tension, from which we can contemplate our limits. Thus they magnify the possibilities for future experience, its envisionment, and the degree of agency possible for anyone aspiring to further heights.   

Pretorius is not centered on a specific formal orientation but oscillates between figural and non-objective métiers. One continuous underlying theme is described in a phrase the artist has coined especially: “Immaterial Topography.” From the roots of each word, one can surmise that Pretorius desires to encompass his entire oeuvre in a manner that allows the viewer to move easily between them. His subject in each case is less the discernible object and more the process that led him to analyze and transform facile appearances into a transitive state of deconstructed realness. That is, the subject is both immaterial--in that its innate qualities need to be stripped down and reconstituted in the most base or essential terms--and the subject is again only the surface of purpose of appreciating creative intents. Shave away each layer of accepted meaning and eventually one is left with a completely different experience, an elemental topography. Here is where the viewer and the artist begin to speak the same language.

The more specific examples of his various bodies of work present the mutable categories of meaning within the overall basis of Immaterial Topographies. The early work which are primarily prints featuring the dematerialized forms of animals native to Pretorius’s surrounding countryside in South Africa, such as vultures, rhinos, elephants, turtles, and gemsboks. Each is presented in a minimal drawing that replicates its naturalistic appearance and then treats them to a formal atomization and reduction of lines and color until all that is left are basic line gestures to infer the type of animal depicted—as if the real creature were being taken out of their everyday existence and translated into a sort of hieroglyphic language narrating the passage of these animals through man’s world at a very early developmental stage in evolution. These are basic modernist tropes devised by Pablo Picasso and made more prevalent during the early Surrealist era by artists such as Jean Miro and Yves Tanguy among others. But Pretorius uses them to manifest specific animals not naturally occurring in a European context, and he does so to address the problems of conserving the species against annihilation as a result of industrial and residential expansion into the last remaining areas of animal territory. This type of consciousness-raising is central to the idealized role of the artist as a truth-speaker. If the animal or bird is depicted in art and ceases to exist in the world, then art itself will lose context.

Pretorius’ other prints, his monotypes, speak to a later period in his personal development when the reflection of pastoral images became subsumed by his newfound workaday impressions; having moved to China from South Africa, and having to reside in massive city centers to pursue professional employment. First Beijing, then moving progressively farther south, to Changsha, and then to Shenzhen, Pretorius made three series of monoprints that responded to what and who he saw around him, and how those impressions resulted in sequences of forms that were both evocative as final images and productive as changing ideas about the formal process at hand. Anyone who has traveled in foreign lands, where the language and customs are different from one’s own will, eventually, feel the downward push and pulse of a great organ of human movement. Making a life in such a place, and a creative life at that, creates images of primal, almost subconscious power. The ‘Hualikan Monotypes’ are the first among these, dating from 2018-19. These have the most elemental appearance, and seem to have been drawn from pieces of flotsam and jetsam, flashes of light, images seen at dusk or through heavy rain. They are evocative of the search for meaning in a new land and the choices he makes of what to print are evidence of that burgeoning consciousness. The ‘Xingsha Monotypes’ were completed from 2019-2020 and they more resemble rubbings or rayographs. There is less implied drama in these images and more of an engagement with the gritty physicality of an urban center. Detritus in the street, broken glass, steps in front of a building, faces passing close up and then quickly away in a deepening gloom, all are on hand. The third series, The ‘Taoyuancun Monotypes’ starting in 2021, are the least dramaturgic. They seem to be based on fast sketches of people standing or reclining while waiting for subway trains to arrive. The sketches are then reimagined in a Cubist fashion inspired by the drawings of Jean Dubuffet, in which almost awkwardly depicted bodies describe gestures without naturalistic detail. Yet the scaling of bodies within an atmospheric blue gradient enveloping them like a sky deepening toward night gives them an idyllic quality. We see bodies together, even mutually alienated ones, and we tend to perceive dramatic connections between them, even if merely imagined. Pretorius’s memories become figures in a dream. The artist, contrary to myths that somehow persist, does exist in the world, and gives meaning to all the individual contexts that have colored his experience as he moves through life challenges and the states of aesthetic engagement that are idiosyncratically intertwined with them. Pretorius has a long and winding tale to tell, and his works do the magic for him. It’s our duty to follow in wonder.

November 2021

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