Henk Serfontein: Mazous Kitchen: Elsiesrivier - SOLD
Henk Serfontein (b 1971)
Mazous Kitchen: Elsiesrivier - 2012
Oil on canvas
64,5 x 80 cm
Signed and dated bottom right
Sold - 2012
Serfontein’s haunts are places of twilight and transition – the lone house, night-time shop, petrol station or abandoned car. In between leaving and arrival, they denote remaining, facing the world as it is. They allude to a pause in the passing of time, a pause in an atmosphere so quiet that it becomes a meaningful moment of contemplation, a moment that, perhaps more than one of physical threat, is one of emotional vulnerability. The artist has remarked that he finds it fascinating that people in our times still stop to look at paintings. “It requires deep delving from the viewer. It takes a special person. Stopping to look at a painting is an act of self-confrontation through internalising an image. Part of the process required to view my paintings is to stand still.” In this stillness, a dialogue takes place with silence and the unspeakable. The paintings draw you to feelings of isolation and loneliness. They initiate you into a landscape of contemplation in which the uncomfortable truths of life are bound to surface in the back of the mind. Sooner or later, you will be face-to-face with death, if only the thought of it. These are places that heighten the presence of time passing and both the transience and ambiguity of human life.
Traveling The Margins by Kai Lossgott