Literature

Having no doubt fallen under the sway of his mischievous teacher Walter Battiss at Pretoria Boys’ High School, Eugene Labuschagne proved a restless and rebellious student at the Michaelis School of Art in Cape Town, and became increasingly impatient to train in a modernist idiom. Frustrated, and happy to abandon his local studies, he moved to Paris in 1947 and focused on developing a Cubist aesthetic. His early experiments were well-received, and he exhibited at the Salon de Mai in 1950 and the following year at the Genoa Biennale alongside the likes of Picasso, Leger and Rouault. While his post-Paris pictures back in South Africa were at once abstract at heart and figurative in subject, the artist produced increasingly illusory and decorative works from the late 1950s. Surface in Flux is a fine example from this period, and hints at the country’s remarkable yet unappreciated tradition of abstract painting.

Surface in Flux is a brilliant and sophisticated modern picture painted in 1960 on the artist’s farm near the western Swazi border. Drawing inspiration from the great Cubist Juan Gris, Labuschagne’s arrangement of exploding grids, oscillating shapes and isolated dashes at no point relies on a recognisable subject for its richness, interest and beauty. A wintry landscape, with its exposed earth, its dormant grass and its dustings of frost, is analysed and deconstructed. Each element of the original scene is reduced to flat planes and linear markings; as any sense of depth or perspective is deliberately resisted, the composition dissolves into pure, fascinating pattern. Revelling in the two-dimensionality of his picture space, the artist’s technique also emphasised the limits of the medium: paint is applied thinly and repeatedly on thirsty, fine-grained panel, scraped back, scumbled, and scratched.