Notes

Alexis Preller’s Icon Barbare (Adam), an oil painting with gold leaf, is a direct quotation of his powerful 1969 intaglio Adam which was purchased in the year of its completion by American collectors and only resurfaced in 2016 when
it was returned to South Africa for sale on a Strauss & Co auction. That important intaglio therefore did not appear on Preller’s 1972 Pretoria Art Museum Retrospective. He did, however, include Icon Barbare and, significantly, reproduced it as a full-page colour plate in the exhibition catalogue. In the earlier intaglio, Adam, the biblical first man, is rendered with a powerful physique. The structure of his chest alludes directly to the idealised body type of the
ancient Greek kouros figures, while the verticality of the seemingly suspended body refers obliquely to an early crucifix sculptural tradition, where the arms were separately attached and were frequently lost. In Icon Barbare, the downcast head has an ambivalent proto-Christian/pagan quality. The ‘empty’ eyes allude to classical bronze sculptural prototypes that have lost their inlaid detail, revealing their sculptural artifice and emptiness. Unnervingly, in the painting the eyes are different, the transparent wash in one being blue and the other pale green, an anomaly that has mystical associations relating to a spiritual awakening. In the prominent, heavily encrusted third eye, which generally implies a state of higher consciousness in Asian art, Preller almost surreptitiously inserts small pictograms of a figure and a serpent, symbolicof ‘original sin’, innate human fallibility. The Christ-like beard and hair are ambiguously transformed with green and leaflike tendrils thus assuming a pagan quality. The transmuted presence feels more like an icon of Pan, the Greek god of nature, of fertility, the mountains and wilds. The head and torso appear transparent on a field of flecked gold, edged on two sides by deep black. It is interesting to note that Preller collected icons and was particularly influenced by the stylised conventions of these visual adjuncts to prayer. His small Gold Primavera
(1967) seems similar to the later Icon Barbare of 1972 in its Prelleresque evocation of an iconic presence. Here too, in Gold Primavera, Preller’s prototypical head becomes a stylised female presence. Seen side by side, these sacred male and female manifestations are startlingly beautiful in their contrast.

Karel Nel

Exhibited

Pretoria Art Museum, Pretoria, Alexis Preller Retrospective, 24 October 1972 to 26 November 1972, cat. no. 184.

Literature

Esmé Berman (1972) Alexis Preller Retrospective, Pretoria: Pretoria Art Museum. Illustrated in full colour on page 184 and in black and white in the list of images.

Esmé Berman and Karel Nel (2009) Africa, the Sun and Shadows, Volume II, Collected Images, Johannesburg: Shelf Publishing. Illustrated on page 231.