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TANGENTIAL HISTORIES - Gregory Kerr - 2026
Paintings 2017 - 2026
Denzil`s and Jo Gallery
Parktown North, Johannesburg
March 2026
Tangential Histories
Paintings 2017 ? 2026
Denzil`s and Jo Gallery
March 2026
Statement by the artist
The work on show is a selection of smaller pieces completed since my last solo exhibition in Johannesburg in 2011.
The title of the show, Tangential Histories, is intended to describe the interaction between the making of paintings, the historical context and the state of consciousness of the artist and thus to attempt to shed some light on the nature of the work.
I say, `attempt` because I am always beset by the elusive character of image-making. It is a strange bedfellow indeed, sometimes clearly generated from identifiable sources and interests, at other times implacable and opaque.
Despite the reluctance of most of my paintings to offer themselves to rational analysis, I like to think that there is a certain cohesion in their technique, design and content.
Technically, I paint within a trusted tradition of processes, mediums, principles of viscosity, reliable grounds and so on. I avoid new-fangled materials like water-based `oils` and citrus solvents. I believe that this is important for the purchaser to know. Also, mundane stuff like regular fumigation of stretchers and frames for borer and other pests.
Design has to do with how I am trained and experienced in a certain genre of oil painting. I doubt there is a label, but for convenience, one could call the approach ?painterly? and the style ?figurative?, with the caveat that the painterliness is not very much about abstract expressionism and the figuration is not very much about naturalism. Somewhere in the infinite space between those, and sometimes more one-sided than the other.
As far as content is concerned, the notion of ?tangential? experience or history is a useful entr?e. In the studio, my attention is quite distracted by being surrounded by dozens of works in progress, shelves of books, pictures, images on my phone, music, podcasts, radio news. My life is peppered with interactions with students across the country who demand care and insight and shifts in my focus. My imagination runs all over the place and one painting might veer dangerously off its original path, another get a dose of a colour I found in a third. I have six mobile easels that can be instantly swapped around to get the attention. I might be day-dreaming of dogs or tornados and then I?ll stop to find a dog or a lovely video of some flying homesteads in Kansas.
All this comes under the general rubric of bricolage, the co-option of anything that happens to be on hand. I sometimes have an earnest and particular intention in mind as the painting starts, but most likely that will be usurped or diverted by any amount of hedgehogs in its barefoot way. The painting is a multisemic beast that goes about picking up and putting down according to the best excuses of all for doing the paintings ? pleasure and self-indulgence.
The 21 paintings I have sent to Denzil are typical of the diversity that is the result of all this. Even one of the simplest, Dog, has a long history of change. It has been around my studio and my house for years, getting gecko poo and dust and being ignored then picked up, cleaned, re-surfaced, over-painted, shifted in hues and then left, finally, to allow its last layer of ground to dry before being packed. This history is a formal one, just juggling with the design and presentation, but others undergo more than this. Towards a hierarchy of needs, for example, is the palimpsest of years of both desperate and casual decisions. Pulled out a stack of similar works every few months for a look and a lick and then a great blow as another protagonist joins the group and the whole compositional language must shift.
People ask me about my titles. Sometimes they don?t need to (Dog), but sometimes they get nervous. Psychic Construction, for example, arrived after I had spent ages being plagued by a yappy Maltese nearby. I painted the Maltese from a toffee tin label then slowly aggregated a vision of the faceless owner as a kind of clothed harpy from the Karma Sutra. All decisions were ad hoc, all content spun from anything I happened to see or construct. The history is tangential to the odd and indefinable circle of my peculiar thought processes. Psychic construction is what I was doing, I think.
Or I take a perfectly unpolemical image (Edblo Phantasy, which is a loose transcription of a photo taken by a friend at Seaview of an intact mattress base washed up on their beach), throw some weather at it, then call it after a famous South African brand (spelled in a clever, psychological way) and let it do the incomprehensible utterances. If a title is something that should explain a work of art, then we are all going to be disappointed by this kind of wantonness.
I would advise the interested reader to avoid asking too closely what the titles actually refer to. I get very defensive and uncomfortable. More often than not, they refer to me, not the work.
My advice is, look at the paintings.
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