Body talk. On the art of Marili Richards
The body is the issue in question. Though that is not strange in the world of art, in the paintings and sculptures of Marili Richards, this issue gains a few new hues...
Three series of paintings by Richards show this. The series are called The Playground, Flesh, and – no less – The Body. Innocent enough themes, by the sound of it, with perhaps a hint of the erotic. However, the realities her art reflect are often stark, harsh, abysmal. For such is the nature of life, at times.
 |
In grey, charcoaled tones, The Playground is a series of works that combine contrasts: the roughness of almost stony textures, broken by the symmetries of lines and outlines, spaced irreverently onto those textures (forcing some order onto chaos?; thus: symme-tricks?); the ancient, earthy colours, broken by symbols of child-like light-heartedness: playground rides; a baby’s dress.
Then the disturbing revelation: these symbols of innocence against the brown and sepia backdrops are meant to comment on the horror of child abuse. The baby’s dress is numbered. 5. What seems at first a curiosity, now becomes a sign of death: it renders a dress a piece of evidence in a court of law. Innocence ended by a number. In the other works in this series, the miniaturised playground toys are in disuse. Not a still life, in the usual artistic sense, but a stilled life: the children have left the park. Have they left life, too...?
 |
The impact of such unexpected contrasts is emotionally gripping. It speaks of an issue that lies close to Richards’s heart. Not lionising either childhood or the innocence of life, but the exact opposite: laying bare in the subtle, psychologically appealing language of art an issue to which appropriate words cannot be put. This is art with a message, though not in an overindulgent, even soppy, politically correct manner. Therein lies the aesthetics of conveying Richards’s perceptions in this series: the seductive purity of the images and textures, inventively superimposed, yet with the stark reality, the message, carried on the sub-currents of connotations.
 |
Flesh is more colourful series, but only in hues. The backroom of a butcher’s store is painted in bright reds and dark reds and dirty reds; in oranges and mustard yellows; in off-whites and greys... In theme, though, this series is as serious as The Playground: the battleground of the body. This is shown by the painted objects: carcasses, skinless and blood-drained; headless and dead; hanging from hooks. The body is not erotic here; it is a site of struggle. It is suggestive of violence, eating disorders, death, being used, losing one’s identity, existing without protective layers – broken lives...
This series consists not only of large painted canvass, but also as a wax sculpture: a hanging bovine cadaver, dead and red, suspended on a cold steel stand. Titled “JEW 2008”, it contemporises and universalises the Nazi persecutions of the World War II period, as a protest in our time against all forms of persecution. The resonance with recent xenophobic killings in South Africa, among a host of other human atrocities in our time, forces the question to the fore: when will the slaughter stop?
The Body, Richards’s third series, takes many forms. Often, it is expressed in charcoal faces: ghostly features, peering earnestly, as if through fog or from stone. The faces seem to be searching – for a soul? More engagingly: for my soul, as the one in visual dialogue with the art piece? Who is this staring at me? And the mirror question: who am I, staring?
In other forms, The Body is presented as mere mouths; lips; teeth. In red and white, they seem to speak – talking directly, almost eating away at your senses. What do they say...? That remains for each art appreciator to “hear”.
Even more disembodied, we see red hearts, in most instances painted alone – the struggle within the body, again: who am I?; what lies at my centre?; what makes me tick? Then, surprisingly: a sketch of a traditional Jesus figure with the holy, red heart... But, more often, Richards paints this same Jesus figure without that centrepiece. Taken together, this raises the question: religion is there, but does it talk to me? The dialogue between faith and non-faith, with a religious culture and an own past, with family and history, with sick bodies and ill minds – themes of embodied identity which few people can escape, and which art such as this pushes to the fore in a way spoken language cannot.
For Richards, to paint is to find the world; to relate to it; to stay with it. It is her way of handling life, but then not in a romanticised way, with only what is pretty that is put on canvass. Rather, real life, and speaking to real life, drips from the drops she paints and waxes. In encountering her encounters with life through her art, the search for meaning is continued in us all. With here and there moments of clarity, in which we grasp meaning, for but that moment, but then, sensing that each such revelation is enough to nurture for a while our hunger for significance in what can so often be a bleak, bland life. Thus, art adds meaning.
 |
© 2008 - 2009. Marili Richards. All rights reserved.
|