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Nuance contains
work by four painters and a sculptor – Catherine Ochulla, Maricel
Albertyn, Lionel Smit, Varenka Paschke and Jonathan Munnik – who speak
to the body as a site of social and emotional politics. Cooperatively,
the work suggests that beauty lies rather in a body’s subtle deviations
from the physical ideal than in the ideal itself.
The human body
is a double-edged concept: on the one hand, since Descartes, we have
believed that the body is fundamentally separate – mere mechanical
matter essentially split from the more complex machinations of mind or
movements of soul. On the other, it is only by virtue of our bodies –
even if they are only vehicles for the mind/soul – that we are able to
experience the world around us. In this sense, taking the body as our
interface with reality, every experience no matter how spiritual or
intellectualised is fundamentally bound to our relationships with our
bodies.
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The body is a perennial
source of subject matter to artists for reasons of common reference –
everybody has a body; every body functions, like the most elegantly
ordered mechanism, in similar ways. Each culture and historical period
has its own idea of the perfect body, which is the definition of beauty
in the physical sense. Contemporarily, a time in which mass
communication is abundant, we are bombarded daily with constant streams
of simulacra – the perfect man, the perfect woman occupy every
billboard. We live also the time of the individual, or so it is said.
However, despite some shared desire to be “unique” the unwavering
torrent of perfect bodies becomes a collective physical goal.
In Nuance, these
politics of the body are addressed. Appropriately, the etymology of the
word ‘nuance’ reveals a connection to clouds, particularly to subtle
shifts in form and colour typical of these atmospheric banks of mist.
Nuance shifts the focus away from perfection (thought to be generally
achievable through the purchase of a particular product or brand of
clothing) and onto differences, blemishes, incongruities as the source
of physical beauty, but also of potential psychological trauma.
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