Robust in its sense of flimsiness

ROBYN SASSEN
Exhibition: Paintings by Daniel Miedzinski, Rabbi Cyril Harris Community Centre, Oaklands

Until:   August 24

 Pictured : Thairianthrope Trance Dance, a work by Daniel Miedzinski.

It’s an engrossing show, in which Miedzinski painstakingly celebrates runaway globules of paint with delicious solemnity. But the work is not dour. Redolent in some respects of autostereograms, the colourful visual exercises that played with two- and three-dimensionality and your eyes, fashionable about a decade ago, the work is witty and sharp.

It might make you think of the whimsical illustrations to be found in many a mediaeval manuscript – on the margins – not part of the general ethos of things. Indeed these pieces are like marginalia. Their abstractness lends them an edge; they cannot easily be categorised or brushed away.

There’s a great consciousness of two-dimensionality in this work: Miedzinski doesn’t try to create an illusion of depth: the work sits on the surface of the support and it is what it is, unabashed. Thus, it leads you in.

Are these formations striations on a rock surface, or are they discombobulated melting naked women’s bodies, à la Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí? Ultimately it doesn’t matter: the work is robust in its sense of flimsiness, commenting on a life’s work which knows itself.

Like the work of Catalan surrealist Joan Miró, the work evades literal description. More’s the pity that it is uniformly small: Working with a distinctive means of layering mediums, Miedzinski drew with a stylus pen and ink onto the slightly plasticised, raised surface of acrylic over water colour, on paper.

There’s a fine sense of patterning in his work that is dictated by the minuscule ridges and irregularities of the acrylic paint. Nothing is by rote or mindless in these intriguing little pieces.

The patterns embrace the form with ardency, but occasionally, there is a sweep of zigzags, a caress of fine line work that rides, tidally to embrace the forms Miedzinski describes. The work, in spite of its small scale, becomes majestic in its suppositions, regal in how it folds itself around an almost literal, but a primarily abstract idea.