Africa’s No 1 Arts Bookstore and Publisher

David Krut Publishing: Fine Art and Books held a solo exhibition of works by Mathew Brittan during the month of May. Brittan describes his works as dealing with mythological elements and being by the tenets of Anthroposophy, a worldview propagated by Rudolf Steiner that influenced artists such as Kandinsky and Beuys in the twentieth century.

Brittan explains Anthroposophy as ‘the notion that artistic creation has significance beyond ourselves and beyond the recognition it may receive. This is because works of art are viewed as a vehicle of spiritual realities or qualities such as colour and form, which in fact can be considered to be the language through which the divine speaks to man’. Brittan’s paintings address philosophical notions of truth and beauty which he views ‘as a primary focus of the arts . . . a beauty which in terms of painting, one tries essentially to express through colour, colour being the true medium of the painter’.

Brittan’s delicately painted works are intimate in scale and evoke calm and composed sentiments. The colour palette consists of mustard yellows, overcast grays, blues, electric reds and ochre browns. The installation of paintings followed a narrative approach with the works opening up like the pages of a book, horizontally displayed one after another. Each painted image does not extend to the edge of the canvas but is instead surrounded by a border of unpainted canvas, which serves as framing device.

Brittan observes that the ‘Themes of the paintings … are derived from feeling aroused by a perspective that sees myths not as being situated in a specific time or space but forming part of the shifting landscape of man’s soul life’. Whilst one is made aware of various philosophical concerns that thread their way through this installation of paintings, it is their appeal simply as paintings and objects of beauty that lingers on in the mind.

Keywords: david krut cape town, David Krut Publishing: Fine Art and Books Cape Town, David-Krut-Projects, Mathew-Brittan, south-african-artists