1st Sep, 2019 9:30
Modern & Contemporary Art
5
Kay Hassan (South Africa 1956-)
PLE
paper construction
Artwork date: 2003
Signature details: signed and dated bottom right
Sold for R125,180
Estimated at R100,000 - R150,000
paper construction
Artwork date: 2003
Signature details: signed and dated bottom right
(1)
108 x 90 cm
Notes:
Kay Hassan’s collage is both simple and perplexing. One immediately recognises a human head, a name stretching vertically at its left, from a viewer’s vantage point, which reads ‘Johannes’ – the name of a man, or a fragment which also suggests the name of a city – Johannesburg. But it is the larger and more perplexing letters – PLE – which leaves the viewer stymied. What do these letters mean? Is it a code or riddle? Or just an infuriating tease, made all the more infuriating given that it is also the name for the work?According to the urban dictionary, a trusty port of call for the nonplussed, PLES = and I’m inferring the existence of a missing letter in Hassan’s collage – is the universal term for please, of course, nice, sweet, sick, awesome, cool. Hassan’s collage, however, is by no means as endearing. Rather, it is as if the artist wishes to keep the viewer at a remove.The product of a long-standing tradition in South African art – and here another titan, Sam Nhlengethwa, springs to mind – Hassan’s collage is typically dark in its hue, a mix of sepia, ox-blood, and a dominant black. This combination of tones suggests the nocturnal – a face emerging enigmatically from a night-world. For it is darkness and impenetrability which is the work’s defining register - as though one was never meant to decipher the face in its entirety, as though the shreds of recombined paper traces were another level of mystery.PLE is not a declarative art work. It harbours no obvious political directive. Rather, what it most effectively achieves is a gnomic force that speaks of an artist uninterested in being understood or recognised as someone for whom prescription matters most. In short, this is no archetypal resistance art work – and yet in the purist sense it is resistant nonetheless.
Ashraf Jamal
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Auction: Modern & Contemporary Art, 1st Sep, 2019
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