Collection: 'In Plain Sight' – Odette Marais and Rentia Retief

'In Plain Sight'

07.02.26 – 08.03.26

EBONY/CURATED Bordeaux House 

'In Plain Sight' brings together two artistic practices that approach observation as a sustained and active process. Across both bodies of work, looking is treated not as a momentary act but as a form of engagement that unfolds over time. Stillness operates here as a means of attentiveness: a way of staying with what is present long enough for perception to deepen, adjust, and sharpen; horizons that recede as they are approached, edges that hold rather than divide.

For Rentia Retief, observation is rooted in prolonged encounters with the landscape. Working from familiar mountain ranges, her paintings hold the viewer at a distance - at the edge of encounter rather than within it. The horizon remains a compositional anchor, not as a destination but as a structuring presence that organises the viewer’s attention. This engagement is echoed materially in her use of unstretched canvas, allowing the expanse of a field or mountain range to exist within a finite surface. These are spaces that do not ask to be traversed or possessed, but encountered. The stillness in her work is deliberate and sustained, shaped by saudade: the melancholic feeling of longing or loving something that you never had in the first place.

Titles such as 'Just Out of Reach', 'Different to What I Remember', and 'Trying Not to Phone You' signal this condition of withholding, much like a horizon, a reaching that never fully arrives.

Odette Marais approaches observation through abstraction, focusing less on what is seen and more on the conditions that make seeing possible. Through fragment, negative space, and flattened planes of colour, recognisable elements surface only momentarily, probing the limits of clarity and legibility.

Observation here becomes an exercise in calibration: a testing of how much information is needed for meaning to begin to form. Her compositions resist containment, asserting that expansion does not require scale or spectacle, but emerges through attentiveness to surface, spacing, and the quiet tension between what is present and what remains unresolved.

Titles such as 'Date Uncertain', 'Where, and How Deep The Wounds Have Been' resist specificity while implying a sense of breaking ground - a new season poised on the horizon.

Read together, the artists’ titles across both bodies of work extend this logic, favouring implication over description; They point not to what is depicted, but to the act of noticing, to moments when attention gathers and something becomes visible without being fully named.

Though one artist works from the physical expanse of landscape and the other from abstracted, interiorised space, both attend to moments where time loosens and perception sharpens. In conversation with each other, 'In Plain Sight' positions observation as a site of encounter: a quiet, active space where meaning is not imposed, but allowed to emerge through sustained looking.