In Search of Lost Time – By Caroline Smart

ArtSmart

16 Sept 2002

The Mezzanine & Park Galleries of the NSA Galleries will host In Search of Lost Time by Durban-based artist Janet Solomon. She will present a body of work produced and developed over five years. Mostly large-scale oil paintings, the works are striking portraits and comments – the artist borrows freely from art history and ‘masterpieces’ and its need for technical perfection to comment on contemporary existential questions and interpretations of beauty.

Positing the work in opposition to more ‘contemporary’ and technology driven art, Solomon is interested in the human struggle through two-dimensional presentation. Interrogating art history and its images, Solomon re-ascribes some works in a new context, and peoples these with individuals that she knows. Sometimes biblical and engaging highly-charged religious imagery, these paintings could also be seen as evoking and unlocking the universal by placing a microscope on the known, mundane day to day peopled world of the artist.

The exhibition is dedicated to a lost friend, Serge Menager, and the show’s borrowed title is not suggestive of literary grandeur or a lifetime’s achievement. The exhibition runs at the NSA Galleries from September 17 at 18h00 until October 6.