The Colourman Chronicles

Colourman (ˈkʌləmən) n, pl -men1. (Commerce) a person who deals in paints. Emmett is a contemporary artist, living and working in Cape Town- South Africa. All images © Rory Emmett Email: [email protected] 

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'Hi-viz Figure lll' (2019) Oil and acrylic on canvas 120 cm x 150 cm . . . #painting #figure #representation #oilpaint #suits #fashion #dress #labour #success #desire #figurativepainting #contemporarypainting #southafricanart #buildingground #greyareas https://www.instagram.com/p/Bxt2CdGjT7_/?igshid=6fd0n9vs0zpi

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'Hi-viz Figure l' (2019) Oil and acrylic on canvas, 120 cm x 150 cm . . . #figure #representation #fashion #dress #labour #desire #contemporarypainting #southafricanart #roryemmett https://www.instagram.com/p/BxZSrjaHj8t/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1s5ijxwe6zzp

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As we salute and commemorate the labour force today, I feel honoured and privileged to be a cultural worker a.k.a an artist👨🏾‍🎨🙌🏾 Thanks to everyone who came out to the opening of my 2nd solo show in Cape Town! Special S/O to everyone who contributed to making it happen🔥 Much love✨ Enjoy your #workersday . . 📸 by: @eddokes79 (at 99 Loop Gallery) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bw6UtUzBKiO/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1en5pvn2r3wxn

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“This exhibition consists of painting and installation elements. I find myself interested in the coexistence of art and labour and the value systems that are produced and exchanged through, and as a result of various forms of work. I attempt to grapple with my immediate landscape on a personal and political level and consider the process of construction, both physical and ideological. Through the process of painting, a kind of surface-building, I seek to visually explore distinctions between "high" and "low" culture, coming to terms with negotiations of living with the symptoms of fundamental shifts in national ideology and ongoing economic transformation. Utilizing the language, alchemy and performance of painting as well as the visual devices of construction and industrialization, I seek to question the symbolic violence of Westernized standards of beauty and success which are still aspired to and normalized within the post-colonial landscape, as well as trying to come to terms with notions of Rainbowism and constructive criticism of a democracy still experiencing growing pains.” . . . #seeyoulater #buildingground #greyareas #capetown #roryemmett #99Loop (at 99 Loop Gallery) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bw33tKkhqYN/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=bpfuov5u1ir

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Future Remnant l (2019) Oil and acrylic on canvas, 90 cm x 120 cm Shown at this year's Investec Cape Town Art Fair (ICTAF)

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New solo exhibition loading... Save the date and join us for the opening of 'BUILDING GROUND: GREY AREAS', 30/04/2019 @99loopgallery Cape Town! 🙌🏾🇿🇦⚒️🎨🔥💎✨ . Pictured here: '1.24' from 'The New Cla$$ic' series (2019) gouache and acrylic on magazine pages, 24 cm x 33 cm . #solo #exhibition #savethedate #loading #roryemmett #99Loop #capetown #buildingground #greyareas (at 99 Loop Gallery) https://www.instagram.com/p/BwY4JrghViT/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=14w1imnel9fby

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https://zeitzmocaa.museum/artists/rory-emmett/ 

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The Devil Loves When We Loathe Ourselves

2018

(Installation View)

99 Loop Gallery, Cpt, ZA

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Coloured Portrait (Favouring Blue)

2018

76.2 cm x 121.9 cm

Oil on canvas

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Coloured Portrait (Favouring Yellow)

2018

90 cm x 120 cm

Oil on canvas

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Coloured Portrait (Favouring Red)

2018

42 cm x 59.2 cm

Oil on canvas

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Wedding Cake

2017

Oil on card

14 cm x 19 cm

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Post

2017

Oil on card

16 cm x 22 cm

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Coloured Photo Album

2017

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Coloured Photo Album

2017

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Concerning Alchemy 

2017

Installation shots

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The Colourman in Context

By Amie Soudien

A ‘colourman’, as Rory Emmett describes, is a figure from the Western art canon who deals with paints. The act of painting, and the nature of pigment itself has long occupied the historical and contemporary painter. Few however, have interrogated the act of painting in its relation to labour, particularly within the context of Cape Town. Concerning Alchemy, the exhibition’s title, encapsulates these concerns in the convergence of pigmentation and identity. Like the medieval practice of alchemy, painters seek to transmute matter in a process that is both rudimentary, and some ways, magical.

For Emmett, the distinction between painter-artist, and painter-worker is personal: the links between his contemporary and ancestral family exist in a continuum that informs the thinking of his current practice, and is central in his subject matter. Emmett elaborates:

 “I seek to interrogate the privilege that makes one person’s work worth more than another person’s work or labour. The work considers the personal narrative of my father’s occupation as a housepainter and renovator, and my title of ‘artist/painter’.”

 This seemingly elegant class conundrum is compounded by the legacy of artisans who were responsible for much of the infrastructural development at the Cape. History tends to neglect their value and contribution because they were enslaved. Slaves who were classified as ‘Malay’ were often skilled in masonry, carpentry, weaving, and cooking, leading to the development of a hierarchical oppressive order, above other slaves with less valuable skills. Emmett, like many Capetonians, was descendent from diverse racial origins, and thus shares in this tradition of making at the Cape.

 In his painting Colourmen, part of a larger mixed media installation titled Artisan Memorial, the artist depicts two people in workwear, surrounded by building tools. Found in a book on Cape Town history, the original image was a photograph of two slaves, both of whom appeared to be skilled artisans. Such photographs are rare, and offer a brief glimpse of enslaved life during a time in which portraiture was reserved for the aristocratic and mercantile classes. In Emmett’s representation of the image, their faces and hands are obscured by a patchwork of colours, a motif that recurs throughout Emmett’s practice. In the insertion of Emmett’s own hand - through painting, through the interference of the image - he is able to actively commemorate the life and labour of those who have come before him.

 Self-representation

 Via a play on words, and the use of “visual puns” Emmett moves through historical time, also made accessible in the use of his family’s photographic archive. The archive forms the basis of Coloured Photo Album, a painting series in which the artist painstakingly reproduces the black and white photographs, save for the subjects’ skins which are blurred out in a patchwork of colours derived from the hues of the South African national flag. Coloured Photo Album takes its title from SantuMofokeng’s landmark body of work Black Photo Album/Look At Me, a collection of photographs of urban black families in South Africa during the early years of commercial photography.

 Emmett’s blurred faces indicate an anonymity that allow viewers to project similar shared experiences captured in their own family photo albums. For the Emmetts and the Kordoms (his mother’s family) however, these works translated from family albums continue to mark both mundane and celebratory moments in time. The artist offers us seemingly restrained titles. Post, for instance, depicts Emmett’s grandfather, who worked as a postman for many decades. Surrounded by his work, there lies a quiet dignity in the scene. Couple with Child, Rory’s grandparents pictured with his father, was undoubtedly a proud and personal moment. Despite the obscurity imbued in their facial erasure, Emmett reveals to viewers joyful moments experienced by many ordinary South Africans in spite of the nightmare brought on by the Apartheid government.

 ‘Coloured’ itself is still a contested term in the South African context. Originating as a racial classification devised by the Apartheid government, ‘Coloured’ was created to describe those who were neither black nor white, but in some way embodied a ‘multiracial’ lineage. Some have embraced the term, while others have decisively rejected it, refusing to conform to the recurring trauma of racial classification and turning towards black consciousness definitions of ‘Black’. Others still embrace both ‘Black’ and ‘Coloured’ identity.

 As Emmett explains, he uses the term ‘Coloured’ as a medium to make sense of systems of classification, as well as to deconstruct them. In his performance Concerning Alchemy, from which the title of the exhibition derives, he performs as Colourman, his exposed skin covered by his painted patchwork motif. Positioned outside the Cape High Court between apartheid-era ‘Whites Only’/’Non-White Only’ benches, Emmett uses a chisel and hammer to carefully obliterate three concrete blocks painted in the primary colours of yellow, red and blue. He slowly disintegrates the bricks to a powder. In mixing them to achieve a chromatic grey, the artist distills the ‘alchemy’ of pigmentation production, and in addition, the liminality of an unfixed identity. In this process, Emmett becomes Coloured on his own terms, whilst “pushing this prescription to new levels.” So too, Emmett dissolves the notion of the ‘Rainbow Nation’, exposing its fragility.

 In facing systems of classification, Emmett reveals the absurdity of rigid schema and the difficulty of life under these circumstances. His work encapsulates a prevailing resilience, in which he strives to overcome and understand the lingering traumas of the past. Focused inward, on family and himself, Emmett roots his explorations in a specific time and place. Titles and images have hidden meanings that grant the Emmetts and the Kordoms an affinity with the work, beyond art historical importance. The lives of his ancestors, however, may never be fully understood. However, in these gestures we slowly move towards a deeper appreciation of their legacies through the re-imagining of these moments.