Repetition series: Local image #48-63
17 Nov 2023
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I have set up the paintings on the wall, precariously, each one balancing on a nail. It took me a long time to set this up, so I really hope that we have a good session contemplating these paintings. This is a series, local images #48-63, as one work; each panel burning the other, influencing the other, each one being among others. The initial themes that impress (that makes an impression, surfaces, manifests, emerges) is decline, or endurance and decline, and disintegration. Right now, as I write this, I am experiencing the optical effect of cogwheels turning. Every time I move my eyes, the flowers seem to move, or turn; and then quickly settle, as I fix my gaze; as if they secretly move when I am not looking. When reading these works in the order they were made, like a text, the narrative commences quite brightly and cheerily: two flowers, or two souls, touching; determined beings, enabled beings; but with dark centres, involved selfish centres. They have a strong determined presence at first; fiery orange petals, which grow paler, as a sort of climax starts; it is as if they start to forget themselves, and they grow paler, their centres become less darkened, and then disappear; or become void and vacant; as they climax. The petals blaze now at climax, the centres are gone, they forget themselves, or are they ecstatic? When they climax, where do they go? After this, the centres start darkening again, the petals start fading, and the disintegration starts. The centres grow dark and selfish again; the petals are now only shadows of what they used to be. The backgrounds, which used to be turquoise and cool, now resemble a burnt field. The vertical background pattern becomes more prominent, their endurance and decline, contingent on this external influence in their lives, like inclement weather; they become savage blooms, enduring and declining. By increments, they lose their physical presence, as if they are becoming too weary to keep showing themselves; they withdraw into the background. In the end, their centres disappear again, but they seem lighter, freer; as their lives draw to a close, they fade away, selflessly, letting themselves go; they decline and disintegrate. What happens when these flowers disintegrate, and lose their determined presence, in this fallen reality, and take their place behind that veil in the background?

Savage Bloom, an exhibition of paintings by Danielle Malherbe and Wayne Vivier at Trent gallery
04 Nov 2022
You are welcome to join us for the opening 4 November 2022 18h30, and to visit the exhibition before it closes 16 Nov.

Artist statement for ‘Savage bloom’ by Wayne Vivier

Some things can only appear when all externality has gone; they have a will of their own. I manipulate the material, an externality, and try to conform it to what I think is my will; again, an externality; but I am not in full control. I learn, rather, to nudge and guide the material, and grow more and more to accept ‘chance’, or the ‘will of the material’, whatever that may be; and through that process negate or mitigate externality, so that those ‘things’ might appear.

The wail, the cry, urgency, harshness, pain, alarm, terror, fear. A baby crying, demanding attention, captivating attention, grabbing attention; primitive primal discontent; dissonant and lacking. Suffering the appeal to appease, to apologise, to appear.

Viewing by LED floodlight, 30w, 2250 lumens. Artificial light, pulsing on and off, starting and stopping, in repetition; causing the works to appear in short repeating bursts, discrete repeating manifestations; existing in discrete repeated bursts, to give the impression of a continuous, coherent and unified existence. Is that how we exist? Is there a point at the sub-atomic level, or beyond, where the ‘somethings’ that constitute us appear repeatedly in short discrete bursts? Do we go in and out of existence? Where do we go when we are not appearing, in the gaps between appearances? Do we flicker and snow? We would flicker if the appearing of our constitutive parts happened synchronously, and we would snow if each part had its own peculiar rhythm, vibration, or wave, oscillating between existence and oblivion. Or do we oscillate between this common reality and a spiritual reality? Are we flickering and snowing in the spiritual realm too? Is that how we can sense it; the pneuma, the presence, the vital force, the spiritual force? And what of a neuron, and the electrical impulses, and the ‘somethings’ that constitute the brain? creating the flickering and snowing thoughts that make up our minds.

The twitches, the glitches, the vibrations, the oscillations, the snowing, the appeals, the cries, the attention grabbing movements, the small movements, the on-the-edge-of-one’s-vision movements, that call to us, that appeal, that appear.

Is a poem emerging, where things flicker and snow? Ebullitions, where things bubble and boil, sudden outbursts of emotion, wailing. Is this some kind of wish fulfilment? a desire to go back before the corruption of man, to a paradise, to a proto-creation, to the mystery of creation, pure, pristine, as intended, all in harmony with your intention, moving like you, with you, in harmony. If I moved like light would there be union, communion?

I see you, I feel you;
blazing in front of me
flickering, snowing, bubbling, boiling, blazing
moving like light
moving like you.

The details of the exhibition can be viewed here at this facebook event: https://fb.me/e/1Z8bNOPi7

Film image #48-51
18 May 2022
As a key paintings give access, or as a guide they nudge, pull and push the mind, and the direction of thought. As filters they select from the infinite complex of possibilities, from the pool of the subconscious, and one’s continuous lived experience.

I made a video to bring out some of the meaning in the artwork. View video and special offer >>

Film image 43 & 47 diptych
15 Feb 2022
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Where there is no time, things come to a ‘standstill’, all information is simultaneously presented, it does not change over time. It is a realm beyond human imagination, but it may be glimpsed in a painting, particularly because a still image presents all its information at once; also, an artwork manifests the world of the inner soul, spirit, mind and God. Contemplating a painting means to pluck it out of time and space, and relation to all other objects. Schopenhauer suggests that it is to forget the why, the when and the whither, and retain only the what, and to stay only within perception. And then time comes to a standstill, what TS Eliot refers to as a ’still point’. It is a strange place where all contradiction is reconciled. It is like a rainbow that rests within the innumerable drops of a waterfall; it is like a sunbeam that pierces the fury of a restless storm.

Midsummer #10 & 12
08 Nov 2021
When I contemplate these paintings I think of two rough boys that have been dressed up in suits, their mother has wiped their noses and told them to behave. There is comedy, as they strain to compose themselves, and to conform. They have been asked to fall deeper into the world of society, and asked to further abandon their own worlds, where the only rule is their rule. I find it sublime to project these landscapes as personalities, perhaps even projecting personalities I know, where instead of seeing their bodies, their faces, their eyes, I would be presented only with these vast expanses of wilderness. It would be sublime because they contain something so profoundly untamable, and a force that would be so far beyond my capability to control.

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