Notes

For nearly four years, beginning late in 1958, Alexis Preller was engaged in an epic, all-consuming and vast commission for the Transvaal Provincial Administration Building in Pretoria. The result of endless preparatory drawings, close historical research, scaled and squared-up cartoons, and even a custom-built new studio at Dombeya, the so-called Discovery mural, measuring 3m in height and spanning nearly 13m across, while an enormous triumph, proved a meticulous and painstaking labour. With the sharply linear and intricate masterpiece behind him, however, he began to re-engage with a more painterly, enigmatic and fluid aesthetic. Landmark examples included the palimpsestic In the Beginning (1962) and The Golden Fleece (1962) which, as his first exhibited out-and-out abstract painting, caused a commotion at the Pieter Wenning Gallery.

An increasing number of non-objective, scintillating canvases, many dominated by gold-encrusted surfaces or expanses of deep crimson, violet and azure, began to feature in his exhibitions. A work called Credo (1963), for instance, a dazzling cascade of colour fragments, was a talking point of the artist’s exhibition at the Pretoria branch of the South African Association of Arts in October 1963. So too was a memorable group of seven abstract paintings – of which the present lot must be one – all listed in the catalogue under the heading Temple of the Sun. While Preller was given to producing variations of a concept, the series had in common a flat, fragment-like form, whether notched, pierced or disintegrating, against a luminous or black background. Much like a tablet marked with puzzling inscriptions, or a ruin scarred with defaced hieroglyphics, a sense of ancient civilisation, a lost language, or a deteriorating history, was evocatively conjured.

Although all seven paintings in the original Temple of the Sun series were uniquely titled, the habit of critics, and Preller himself, to use the catch-all title interchangeably, has caused confusion when it comes to identifying specific works. Be that as it may, this particular version of the theme, with its screaming scarlet palette and absorbing devices and scrawls, is magnificent, gripping and imposing. No surprise then that it might be the very work captured in a striking and intimate photograph in Esmé Berman and Karel Nel's Africa, the Sun and Shadows (vol. 1) (Johannesburg: Shelf Publishing, 2009) on page 205, hanging low on a lime-washed wall, and given pride of place by the artist in his Dombeya home.

Exhibited

South African Association of Arts, Polley’s Arcade, Pretoria, Alexis Preller, 15 to 31 October 1963.