Collection: AFTERIMAGE - SELWYN STEYN

Lemkus Gallery is delighted to present afterimage, a new body of work by Selwyn Steyn. This exhibition marks a formal shift of focus in Steyn’s work, opening up his painting practice, which has always been drawn from architectural forms, to include a firmer presence of figuration. Working as both an artist and an architect, Steyn is acutely aware of how environments hold memory on both structural and poetic registers. Namely, how South Africa’s spatial apartheid continues to deepen historically entrenched material and psychic fractures which remain unresolved, he traces these fissures by looking askance at the cultural inheritance of rainbow nationalism, presenting a series of scenes which can be read as both serene and sinister.

By drawing on a wealth of politically charged media references, Steyn offers a chronology of moments filled with light leaks and jump cuts. The scenes are bleached and overexposed, filled with a brightness that creates ambiguity in the shadows. This hints at their contextual grounding, which explores omnipresent tensions that continually strain against the guise of mundanity. Steyn's manner of looking hinges on the moment of encounter and how this inevitably saturates one's relationship to space and place. The paintings rest in a muted realm that at first seems to obscure but inevitably reveals a much sharper interior.

Steyn’s imagery is specific and incisive; each represents a moment drawn from history. There is a curious mixture of old photographs, Associated Press archives, documentaries, and travel video logs from the seventies up until the early nineties. This contrast in source material sets up an inherent tension between news and leisure, the public and the private. A work which inhabits both of these modes is a portrait of Breyten Breytenbach painted after a still from the documentary titled ‘A Season in Paradise’, which follows him as he revisits the chain of events leading up to his imprisonment by the Apartheid government. In it he recounts, “South Africa, my past, had become a no-man’s land”.

Breytenbach was keenly aware of the psychic slippage between utopic and dystopic realities which continue to make up the fabric of the country^[1], a paradise for some, a no-man's land for most.

This body of work reflects a similar poetic sensibility, lying in the lapse between these worlds. Many of the spaces Steyn conjures might have been mistaken for scenic vistas were it not for a veil of rust-dust tones that settle on every surface. The works enact a kind of historical detritus and invoke what anthropologist and historian Anne Stoler calls a process of ‘Ruination’^[2], which she outlines as a manner in which imperial power and colonial aftermaths continue to erode and reshape the present.

This aspect of ruination feels particularly piercing in the portrait of St George’s Cathedral, where Steyn has captured a moment when the news camera lingers on the cross before whipping down to a group of protestors engaged in a sit-in and hunger strike. The journalist from the Associated Press bulletin informs its viewers on the 23rd of April 1982, “Their demand is simple: the right to live and work in Cape Town as families”^[3]. Steyn has painted the cross without the families, but with the knowledge they are waiting just beyond the frame. Forty-four years later, those families have moved on, but the image of the cross, a fleeting moment in a news bulletin, remains. It has lingered so long that its original appearances in dull grey-green tones on CRT televisions have aged and developed into a burnt orange solar glare.

Many of the paintings withhold the vibrancy of static noise which fills degraded film footage. Minor visual aberrations: forms flicker, and colours bleed past their own boundaries. This is how Steyn’s figures begin to merge with their surroundings' architecture. Even notable figures such as Ingrid Jonker and Moshekwa Langa lie on the cusp of being subsumed into a hazy trick of the light. The angularity in the bridge of a nose, or the way a hazy penumbra pools beneath the arch of a brow, becomes more suggestive of sculptures than people. Steyn suggests that by maintaining his architectural approach in figurative painting, he intends to reflect their presence not as subjects but rather as interlocutors for shared social, historical, and psychological conditions.

This treatment of these figures, who seem to diffuse into their environments, reflects elements of psychogeography.^[4] This concept deals, in part, with urban alienation and how built environments inform human behaviour. In a country marked by segregation and dispossession, the manner in which its cities shape experience becomes generationally entrenched. Shared, public spaces are always charged with these legacies; even in moments of calm, the imposition of the past^[5] keeps looming.

The exhibition title, afterimage, is a word most often associated with that brief electric buzz of light behind the eyelids. That mottled snapshot that briefly reduces peripheral vision to a vague impression.  In many ways, Steyn’s paintings mimic this sensation. But this definition is not limited to sight; it includes the haptic afterlife of any vivid feeling. In dredging up and carefully recomposing what were once passing moments, each image is both drawn into the present while becoming further fixed in the opaqueness^[6] of its time and place.