Repetition series 2023: Film image #73-88, or I had a dream
27 Jan 2024
Find yourself even if you do not neatly fit into pre-established categories. Embrace the fragmented nature of your identity, or the seemingly fragmented nature of it. Find new ways to hike up that mountain, climb that tree, and find God. Be a tree that provides shade and fruit, even if it has cracks and weak branches. Build a strong neck that will hold your head up straight. Calibrate even eyes. Look until you can see. Observe without judgement, long enough to able to see what needs to be seen. Set your feet on the ground and your head in the clouds. Accept your shadow, face your shadow, observe your shadow, confront your shadow. And make the grass grow - tend your garden .

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Repetition series 2023: Film image #57-72, or Tend your garden
26 Jan 2024
They are starting to pull me to their level; I'm starting to notice the contrast of white on white. They looked a bit messy before, and all I could see were the mistakes, the 'errors.' Sometimes, an error is just an error. They are creating little spaces at the moment in which something interesting resides, though I don't know what—little areas of emotion. View special offer and video

Repetition series: Local image #48-63
17 Nov 2023
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Reflection of the sky, flying over the surface of the water, and watching our reflections. Constellation, stars, speaks of gods, the divine, celestial beings, the spiritual realm, of our ancestors. Do I remember this? Is there the wiring in my brain that recognises these past visions? Seeing oneself reflected in the sky like a god, like a star in the third heaven. Was I there once? Was I with you once? Am I remembering, now? Where does this vision come from? Why do I think it is beautiful?

A collaboration with the paint, and whatever is adhering to the moment, the ‘something more’ that adheres to the moment of creation, not my will but yours, allowing the paint to run, giving the paint an opportunity to do itself, to do your will.

Savage Bloom, an exhibition of paintings by Danielle Malherbe and Wayne Vivier at Trent gallery
04 Nov 2022
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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.

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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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