Rossouw van der Walt
Van der Walt’s work deals with the layer that surrounds the figure and the disturbances created therein through our daily routine. The constant awareness of the distance of strangeness and the intimacy of closeness between the self and the other is reduced to fragments, simplified and restructured to solidify the space between people. It deals with interpersonal emotions and questions the nature of relationships.
This takes the form of scenes, where the emphasis is on the setting rather than the figures. The beauty and precision of Classical sculpture is omnipresent in his work, so is the devaluing of it to the mundane and perishable which makes his incorporation of the ruin (the disintegration of the fragile over time) seem inevitable. He traces the figure through time where he sometimes attempts reversing the unavoidable decay through restoration by carefully restructuring the fragments to represent the whole. This partial presentation of the figure sometimes presents the anxiety of entrapment, other times the incompleteness of solitude.
Rossouw van der Walt lives and works from his studio in Onrust, Western Cape, South Africa.
