PRESS RELEASE
@ERG - JORDAN SWEKE: IT IS WITHIN
Aug 31 – Sep 21, 2019
ARTIST: JORDAN SWEKE
EXHIBITION: IT IS WITHIN
GALLERY : EVERARD READ JOHANNESBURG
DATE: 31 AUGUST 2019 – 21 SEPTEMBER 2019
TIME: 10:30 – 13:00
CURATORIAL INVESTIGATION
It is easy upon first reflection to review Jordan Sweke’s practice as an archetypical duality of realism vs abstraction. Sweke creates visual manifestations that stretch from detailed abstraction, into cellular binaries and through into formal landscapes. One can often be compelled to explore this variety as simply deliberate contradictions. On the one hand, we observe organic forests, trees, sky or the sea and then when we approach closer to investigate surface details, these quickly become a dissolved and broken geometry – like pure gesture, with pattern and coded formula.
These contrasts of positive and negative spaces, lightness versus darkness, a chaos versus order, seem to evoke opposing narratives. However, by the artist’s own account, the combinations of the contrasts converge into a third thread, a ‘space’ which is not so much ‘abstracted’ or ‘realistic’ or ‘micro’ or ‘macro’ but rather an in-between that the audience inhabits as they engage with the artworks.
There is a combination of natural materiality and digital process as well as of realism and abstracted pixilation and these all serve to catapult the audience from omniscient observer to face head on their actions, their effects, and our place within nature and the whole world around us.
- Emma Van Der Merwe
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Jordan Sweke is an independent South African multi-media artist from Johannesburg, currently based in Cape Town. Jordan’s practice is concerned with an extensive and ongoing exploration of oil paint as a medium and branches out into a wide array of media. His work is primarily influenced by the connection between humans and the natural world and focuses on natural South African landscapes and indigenous wildlife. His main concerns are to bring immersive natural landscapes into urban spaces and to urge the public to reconnect with their natural heritage. In 2014, Sweke received an Honours degree in Fine Art, specialising in painting, from Michaelis School of Fine Art. Every piece at his graduate exhibition was sold. Since then, Jordan has received strong support from local and international collectors. He has had numerous commissions and his works have been exhibited at multiple solo shows, locally and abroad, as well as at group shows that have included work by internationally renowned local artists.
