‘No Signal, No Message, No Secret' - Richard Templeton Smith

‘No Signal, No Message, No Secret' - Richard Templeton Smith

EBONY/CURATED Bordeaux House, Franschhoek

Saturday 11th February 2023

Continues until 31st March 2023

 The human figure is a recurring subject in Richard Templeton Smith’s work. Throughout his career, Smith, who came to prominence in the late 1960s with his brilliant caricatures, has routinely depicted the figure, sometimes describing his human subjects with a great degree of fidelity and care, at other times wilfully exaggerating and deforming them. In this, his 5th solo exhibition, titled ‘No Signal, No Message, No Secret’ the artist revisits the surreal, the humorous and the outlandish with his signature artistic vision.

Born in 1947, Smith has held over 50 solo and group exhibitions worldwide. Currently living in Spain, this South African/British artist remains an authentic voice questioning himself as an artist as well as the viewer with his views on figurative and abstract modes of representation.

“His career-long devotion to human subjects is not simply a matter of recurrence; his figures achieve more than mere presence, they dominate his work. Sometimes this is obvious and literal, as in his earlier charcoal drawings, which record the artist’s observant encounters with actual sitters. In his more recent oils, where the figure is a silhouetted and vestigial being seen in a reduced environment, the human subject is a counterweight to the abstracted drift of his new painterly compositions. This idea of weights and balances is important to appreciating Smith’s recent work. Whether specifically identified or generically portrayed, his figures are a ballast, a stabilising device in a career marked by intermittent flirtations with modes of realism and abstraction” Sean O’Toole

Works on exhibition

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