KAREL NEL | Translucent Worlds

The works on this exhibition are distillations of experiences gathered from my own life’s journey, and by extension from those of others. I am thinking of the haiku that the Japanese poet, Basho, wrote in The Narrow Road to the Deep North, and the hundred woodcuts that Hokusai did of views of sacred Mount Fuji. I am thinking as well of the visual poems of Hiroshige’s series of woodcuts, produced in the 1830s, after his first travels along the road to Tokaido that connects Edo to the imperial capital, Kyoto. I am thinking too of the sculptor, Brancusi, walking from Rumania to Paris, and Gauguin’s long journey from Marseilles to Tahiti to escape from the rampant industrialisation he saw in Europe. Journeys such as these have layered my consciousness during my own travels to places like Brancusi’s studio, to the temples of Kyoto and Nara, and to Uppsala, Linnaeus’s university, as well as to the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm, Sweden. These places have – in turn – brought me to new insights that flow into these works.

The complex process of drawing, for me, is a way of trying to understand, to grasp both the manifest and the ineffable. This interest in the world and its shifting paradigms has led to a lifetime of journeying, thinking, connecting with others, and always drawing. While the finished drawings are undertaken with great precision, they are also infused with the ungraspable, created by vanishing points and shifts in perspective. In Portrait of Per Wästberg, for example, the third library of his lifetime stands in for him: each coloured line, the spine of a book, represents a world that he has read and entered, as head of the Nobel Literary Committee for almost two decades. The black and white works, begun as rubbings on the pavements and columns of Paris, evoke after-images of Brancusi’s studio in Dreams and Tools, Impasse Ronsin, Paris, as well as the forest shrines of Uji and Kyoto, visited in the previous year, in Unfolding Worlds, Kyoto/Paris.  

These new works once again evoke Brancusi’s studio, and his Kyoto visits, but reflect shifts in Nel’s consciousness between visits, bringing about changes and reconfigurations, evident in this new body of work, and already the next drawings in his mind’s eye await their turn to be unfolded in the studio.

For any further enquiries please contact gallery@everard.co.za