Andre Naudé

Andre Naudé has been painting, educating, printing, collaborating, judging national art competitions, curating, and spending time abroad since the 1970’s. He concerns himself first and foremost with the process of painting. He is a colourist and over the years his subject matter has been concerned with the human condition as well as with his immediate environment; often using the traditional tablescape as his main vehicle of comment.

Andre Naudé's works reflect an incisive discourse with cross-cultural appropriation, capturing the transitional visual fusion of South African multicultural pluralism.

To quote Lucia Burger: “above all Andre Naudé is a Flirt. He cannot resist the seduction of forms and textures. Colour is for him the essence of the diversity, richness and the very soul of the Life of objects, nature and humanity.In his paintings, he handles the issues relating to culture with a panache that would make politicians blush. He refers to certain symbols and icons in a language which is unique and exclusively his own. He uses paint on any surface with the assurance and dexterity of a magician and allows colours to compliment each other, blend and oppose with the confidence of an accomplished lover.”

Prof Keith Dietrich, head of the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Stellenbosch states: ‘Irony is one of the crucial dimensions to his work, and in particular his sense of dark humour, crouched in a luscious though fragile veneer of paint that enchants and lures the viewer.
Underneath the decorative, visceral, sensual and tactile surface of Andre’s painted surfaces lies a darker side to his reality as a South African. Dark humour, satire, and parody are directed toward the social norms of living in Pretoria.

The alarming and absurd social conditions that he experiences in his home city are transformed into an ambiguous interplay between survival, optimism and hope. For Andre, his images express his ambivalent relationship with South Africa with its extreme splendor and feelings of hope and optimism on the one hand, and its extreme sense of absurdity, banality and despair on the other.’

In the series of prints that the Andre Naudé did at The Artists’ Press his apparent playfulness that masks more serious issues is evident. The poignancy of his subject matter is hidden behind the artist’s masterful control of colour and line. Naudé’s fine sense of humour is apparent in the titles to his work that hint at how these reflect the world that he inhabits.

Artist’s Statement:

Lamentation
The work is rooted in still life, as a vehicle of contemplation of indigenous/locally found objects. Several of the elements were appropriated by the artist from the Bag Factory’s studios’ (interior). This includes wooden logs from Joachim Schonfeldt’s blue gum tree sculpture, a hospital trolley and waste bins displaying the words NO HOT ASH. The artist has juxtaposed these with elements from his paintings at the time. Men’s cologne vessels (en-titled HAVANA,) smoke from a so–called Cuban cigar. Contemporary urban everyday is married and underpinned to suggest a neo-capitalist adoration.

Prints proofed May/June 2006
The head as object, human female body and shoe as object, talk about contemporary elevation of low technology production to acquiring a suspciously elevated neo-aesthetic. These prints could refer to both the specific and the non-specific in terms of image and context. One could refer to prototypes/stereotypes, contrasted by the viscerally sensuous indulgence of traditional mark making.Images suggest a latent kinetic implication, implying stillness, activity; still life and the living. Andre Naudé.


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Lithographs

Lithograph 1997

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