Notes

His love of the arts and his knowledge of diverse cultural forms enabled Robert Hodgins to draw on a range of characters and plots to delight both his viewers’ intellect and senses. As Kendell Geers points out:
It was through art museums, theatres, music, and literature that the young Robert Hodgins found his escape from the London of the Depression-era 1930s, an escape that no doubt still informs his conception of art and his understanding of its possibilities. ... A vast library of cultural knowledge and points of reference is filtered through lived experience and deposited onto the white canvas, a battleground of countless possibilities but only one solution. The end is never the destination – as colours shift and are overpainted, forms are left unfinished as ideas are slowly given expression.¹

Mozart’s Don Giovanni centres on the rise and fall of the notorious libertine, whose servant Leporello recounts his seduction of over 2000 women in the celebrated Catalogue Aria. Librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, basing his narrative on Tirso de Molina’s seventeenth-century play, casts Don Giovanni as a predator who seduces women and murders their menfolk, emphasising the character’s darker side in this opera which is, by turns, mischievous and harrowing.

Its full title Don Giovanni: The Libertine Punished or, in Italian, Don Giovanni: Il dissoluto punito, anticipates the villain’s end in which he is dragged to hell by one of his victims. The subject fascinated audiences as much as it did artists, with no lesser poets than Byron and Baudelaire producing epic poems on the antics of this rake.

In this reflection on contemporary power, Hodgins seems to question whether punishment is likely. With his fiendish face, sinister eyes and livid skin, Don Giovanni finds himself here, not in a fiery furnace but in a hell that is clinical, well-lit and white-tiled. Casting a cursory glance over his shoulder, it’s questionable whether that self-satisfied smirk betrays any guilt. We imagine he has little remorse. On the contrary, one senses that this Don Juan is looking forward to the ride.

¹ Kendell Geers ‘Undiscovered at 82’ in Atkinson, Brenda et al. (2002) Robert Hodgins. Cape Town: Tafelberg. Page 65.