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House of Fran
Guy simpson
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Exhibition text bySEAN O’TOOLE
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"The subject of Guy Simpson’s debut solo exhibition, House of Fran, is his childhood home in the Johannesburg suburb of Sydenham, its atomised elements rather than its measurable form as a suburban type. Simpson was six when he moved into the pitch-roofed bungalow at 82 Pembroke Street, near Linksfield Ridge; he left when he was nineteen, to study fine art at the Cape Town Creative Academy. His mother, Francesqua, is currently in the process of selling the house and has been disposing of unwanted household contents."
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"During a recent visit, Simpson photographed familiar details of the house: light switches, plug points, window blinds, hinged cupboards, brass numbers, scuffed parquetry flooring, a sensor beam linked to the home’s alarm system. With the exception of a reupholstered Louis VX-style armchair that was formerly covered with a zebra-print fabric, Simpson’s paintings depict generic and fungible landmarks of his youth that will eventually all transfer to the new owner."
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"Simpson’s spare and unsentimental compositions in House of Fran are an expression of a formal enquiry that has occupied him throughout his career as a painter. “What,” asks Simpson, “is the least I can do to represent this door or parquet floor or plug? How do I do that?” The materialist focus of the initial question is important to register."
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"The paintings in House of Fran are not about Sydenham, where in 1910 French aviator Albert Kimmerling first proved that flight at high-altitude was possible in South Africa and, in 1941, Kowie Marais – a white nationalist journalist and judge turned progressive politician – was arrested for his youthful pro-Nazi activism. These contextual facts, which extend to the neighbourhood’s strong Jewish character, sit far outside the frame of Simpson’s paintings of commonplace things from an anonymous suburban home."
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"Simpson is in that profitable early phase of his career as a painter where he is still experimenting and figuring stuff out, be it how colours mix and paint settles, or how small details, given the dignity of notice, can provide something approaching an insight. In this, his process, which is also an act of painterly faith, reminds me of film historian Donald Richie, who said of traditional Japanese aesthetics: '[T]he ostensible is the actual, the apparent is the real. We see what is there, and behind it we glimpse a principle.'"
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"Truth is a quizzical cynosure in our post-truth era. Rather than shy away from hunting for glimpses of it, Simpson has committed himself to finding it – “small truths from within the giant-ness of changing life,” as he neatly put it in 2020 – in what is visible and apparent, be it a popcorn-textured wall with panic button and light switch, or an unloved chair that will likely remain after the last of the Simpson family leaves 82 Pembroke Street."
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Liminal States: 13 Questions for a Post-Materialist Agenda
By Sean O’TooleIs it not the liminal that beckons, a place of paradox and transition?
Are we not thoroughly tired with the ordinary, obliged to commit blasphemy against the banal?
In Cape Town, where geological time and history intertwine, is it not our duty to engage with the forgotten matter and disowned narratives?
Should we not be committing ourselves to repurposing blister packaging, transforming plastic carrier bags and ennobling engineered wood?
Is plastic – that unsung hero and scorned villain, that chameleon of our material world – not just polluting our oceans, but redefining reality?
Being alternately pissed off and bored, should we not express our mourning in objects that astonish and marvel?
And what of all those other material possibilities? What of household paint that flecks like burnt skin or clay that is excavated from an increasingly ravaged earth?
In Cape Town, the city of contradictions, is it not time to question and challenge the diverse materiality – clay, stone, metal, wood, plastic, so much plastic – that engulfs our lives?
Can we not push the boundaries of the synthetic and propel ourselves into an ambitious, experimental dance with security cameras, sprinkler heads and colourless straws, resurrecting artisanal traditions and embracing consumer waste as our muse?
In this materialist agenda, where we embrace the experimental and destructive, can we not create anew from a merger of the freshly packaged and discarded, to forge an emergent narrative from the abundant – and increasingly unspun – media of our time?
Is this the way to shed light on the obscure corners and make blasphemy against the mundane?
In a world that hungers for sense, shall we, artists, be the ones who offer the opportunity to make sense of the nonsense at a time when the garbage cans of the city are overflowing with empty champagne bottles?
