Nathan Jansen van Vuuren

Nathan Jansen van Vuuren is a young artist based in Johannesburg. He received his BA Fine arts from Wits University in 2007 and is currently completing his MA at the same institution. His work can be described as contemporary figurative painting, with a focused interest in using digital media, in particular the video still, in portraiture as well as other genres.

Nathan Jansen van Vuuren has partaken various group exhibitions over the last two years.

My primary interest in approach was to paint portraits and seriality. I am interested in the articulation of the primary event or narrative with a particular attraction to the experience of that of the traumatic. The testimonial politics of account of any event always is a mere representation of memory, processed by cognitive devices to be presented into the world of what is known. The traumatic event resists this kind of mental processes as emotional and physical pain are involved and it is this nature that cannot be translated into conventional historic accounts.Â

Therefore trauma resists representation and thus the person who experienced that trauma solely owns the experience. It is within this issue of ownership that I position myself. My sitters are asked to give an account of a memory or traumatic event, which I then film. In certain instances I have merely staged the account of trauma by recording an actor reciting a monologue or mimicking facial contortions of pain. In doing so I intend to elucidate the elusive nature of trauma, the presence of an event, a conversation and testimony of, and about, an event that is inaccessible to the viewer.Â

The painting then registers as a subjective process that is beyond true capability to represent that process.

Once I have filmed my sitter the film is isolated into sequential stills. From these stills I’ll select two or three to embark in a process of editing in which the image is pixelated, posterised, inverted and colour balance is thrown off its equilibrium to a point where the image begins to dissolve and tones break through edges and fuse with other pictorial elements. These images act as the primary source material for the paintings; translating the digital devices to affective painterly devices- harsh acidic colour resembling facial burns, fragmented features and flat tonal planes. The significance of the digital image not only serves the formal purposes it is situated in memory, as it is a recording, or memory. The degraded image speaks of the incapability of accurate memory and representation of a traumatic event.

The paintings, produced from stills reflect broken moments of time, not necessarily a linear progression hence my use of the word ‘ seriality’. This device enhances the gap between viewer and ownership of primary experience by the broken and unknown sequence of events and time.

 Information courtesy of the artist.