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THE ART OF PAUL DU TOIT
By Chris Roper

Pleasure is the driving force behind Paul du Toit's art, the very engine of its bright being. It's impossible to look at his multicoloured portraits and not feel this. Happiness is worked into the texture of the canvas, slashed into it with a variety of homemade tools that remind one of a Faustian toymaker's toolbox.

There's more art than artifice in the bold lines of the distorted faces and mutant eyeballs, zigzag smiles and startled grimaces. The bright colours mask the faces as a carnival grotesquerie that alludes more to the dark torment of the freakshow carny than the mundane hilarity of the circus clown.

So there's pleasure, yes, but it's a pleasure not untroubled by pain. The endless, almost obsessive repetition of Paul du Toit's ungainly portraiture is a search for perfection, perhaps, but it's also a ritualistic figuration and refiguration of the agony of that futile search.

When I talk of repetition, I don't mean that the paintings look similar. Far from it: each apparently crude face is different from the previous, sometimes subtly, at other times wildly. Each painting is unique, with its own quirky characteristics. You can find Paul du Toit's work in every far-flung corner of the globe, and this isn't just another cliche: in his geometry of gawkiness, globes do have corners, in the same way that his faces and bodies have angles that mock representation, but that convey a certain reality.

I'm tempted to say, stealing from Baudrillard, that Du Toit's paintings murder the real, and that they are more industrial simulacrum than representation. They exist inside their own economy, in more ways than one.

In an economy of meaning, what they are (both in the way Du Toit produces them, and in the way people look at them) is determined by an exchange that takes place within themselves, in an uninterrupted circuit that doesn't need external reference or institutional circumference. Forget the real world, forget the art world. These paintings are all about themselves, obsessively so. And if the viewer is happy to share in that sense of self, and partake of its joys, then the paintings have worked.

In an economy of money, the value of the paintings mimics this same exchange. People - a lot of people - buy them because they like them. I have no idea why they like them, I can only tell you why I do. I could speculate, of course. Maybe the people who clamour to buy them like the pleasure they see there, maybe their finely judged naiveté reminds people of some happy childhood that never existed. Maybe the cheerful colours go with the furniture. It doesn't matter. The endlessly repeated pattern of desire and gratification, that determines the way they are painted, also determines the pleasure they bring to people.

I like them because they aren't real. They don't even attempt to mime reality. They are paintings of imitations of reality. You don't have to know what that reality once was, in Paul du Toit's brain, because his work doesn't live in the time of that reality. It lives in the force of its colour, line and balance, and in the pleasure of that moment of looking at a crazily happy face, and seeing it look back at you.

Chris Roper is a cultural critic who contributes to various publications across a variety of media and genres, including the Mail & Guardian and M-Web.



Essay by Mark Jurey, Professor of art
California State University Northridge

I left the Picasso museum in Paris in a Bart Simpson funk. I had the feeling that I was being conned. How many examples of male genitalia and pubescent hormone problems can one endure before noon. Much of it seems to ooze with the ego-driven, politically-correct, look of a fake. Picasso's work was influenced by pre-literate masks and sculpture, but Pablo was playing visual games with second hand imagery.

Paul du Toit's work may look like Picasso's, but, unlike the Macho Man, it has the integrity of a first hand experience. Having discovered his painting and sculpture, I was surprised to find that Paul shows the energy and clarity of a true primitive. He seems to have a special contact with the loony evolution of the Universe and is able to express this connection in his work. These are not just happy portraits, they are more like yantras and mandalas that align our perception with the forces of change.

Paul has none of the hang-ups of an academically trained artist. We can see the clear vision of a child and experience the joy that we once felt before confronting the seduction of words and the judgment of history. They glow with the confidence and perfection of refrigerator drawings, yet, with the intuitive precision and the empathy that comes from living a full contemporary life. These perfectly primitive images feed on the insanity of our digital culture and align this virtual reality with universal needs. If his work reminds us of Bart Simpson, it may be because they both so clearly reflect our media mad lifestyle.

Du Toit's recent sculpture is an extension of his unique vision of the world. Free of the distractions of art history and the visual games of the past, he is able to take full advantage of found objects and materials. In his hands, auto parts become an assemblage of contrasting positive and negative forms. Each shape and color has an character that we intuitively know; one that corresponds to essential processes in nature, culture and in our own being. Because it is informed by direct experience, the sense of balance is complete and the harmony of elements is refined. It all seems so easy, so right.

After a quiet morning spent in a garden of Miró sculpture, I feel free...I smile knowingly at the world around me. But, humor like first hand knowledge and honesty, will always be politically incorrect, and, happy art has rarely been taken seriously. I suspect that de Toit, like Miró and Simpson, will be the exception to this rule. Standing in California, the media and hype capital of the world, it looks like Paul de Toit is the real thing.
© 7/2001 Mark Jurey Professor of art California State University Northridge


Essay by South African writer and Novelist
GUS SILBER

WELCOME TO PLANETPAUL

Somewhere between El Dorado, the Island of Fook, and the Big Rock Candy Mountain, you will find the planet of Planetpaul, a place that would be mythical were it not so tangibly, palpably real. I know, because I have been there. I know, because that's where I live. Well, not always; sometimes, I am forced to return to the Third Rock from the Sun, to grapple with the terrors of terra firma, to wander through a wasted landscape of autumnal browns and pale, washed-out yellows, to wonder why the people around me are so curiously lacking in definition, in line, in colour.

That's when I wish someone would take a big, bold finger, dip it in a pot of paint, gouge deep canyons across a canvas, stab two impact-craters for eyes, slap a couple of hot-dog buns where the lips should go, plough a wavy furrow at the hairline, and plaster the gaps with liberal dabs of cyan and magenta and yellow and maroon and orange and red and lime-green and electric-blue. Ah, that's better. I first saw the face of Planetpaul while trawling the Internet one evening, in search of the most abundant element in the universe: Information. I was downloading pop songs and poems and photographs and software programs, not because I needed them but because they were there, free for the taking, all cunningly wrapped up in the same binary packages of zeroes and ones, albeit arranged in a slightly different order. I paused for a while at a site called Planetpaul, and that's when I virtually fell off my chair, because I found myself staring at a painting by an artist named Paul du Toit.

It was a painting of a face - I think it may even have been called Face - and the artist had signed his first name in big capital letters in the bottom left-hand corner, with the L in Paul facing the wrong way, like a child tripping backwards down the street, oblivious to the traffic and the warning shouts of his elders. I stared at the face for a while, mesmerised by the spidery lashes, the blue beret, the ultraviolet lips, the nose like a dagger, the silver and gold dots like Morse Code or money falling from heaven. Then I did what I always do when I find something I like on the Internet: I right-clicked and saved the painting to my hard drive. But as I watched it on my screen, I began to realise the limitations of the digital medium. The face seemed flat, distant, untouchable. So I sent off for the analogue version, and now it's hanging on my wall. It is not alone.

For I live in a world of orbiting atoms and flying bugs and giant gnashing teeth and floating faces and kaleidoscopic eyes and space horses wearing takkies. I live on the planet of Planetpaul, somewhere between El Dorado and the Island of Fook and the Big Rock Candy Mountain. Come on in. Step on up. Put your face in a different space. Welcome. You'll never want to go back home.

Gus Silber - Somewhere on PlanetPaul.

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