Paintings
With Western theory in a critical state and with the apparent failure of rationalism, can the project of humanism be continued? How does one get a message across when meaning doesn't exist? Perhaps as it has been done before - by bypassing the rational, and directly seeking emotional and sensuous responses, as the expressionist painters did.
Jane Wege's paintings speak from her experiences of being a woman and living in South Africa - experiences she links together through the shared bond of an oppression which yet seeks to construct itself as "rational".
The emotional and physical materiality of Wege's work communicates her message. She lays paint on with thick bold strokes and in bright strong colours to create a rich and tantalising surface which, in most works, appears to hover over a dark, mysterious background.
On closer consideration, after the impact of colour and texture, the rational is to be found after all: In Wege's work there is a deep involvement with history, its consequences and implications, challenging the viewer to "make sense" of her connections and to act on them.
The work is unashamedly political, operating within a humanist/modernist project some would say is dead. Yet it speaks with power. Her concern with colonisation and its subsequent alienation for the colonised, sweeps through history and across the lived experiences of women and blacks.
In some works - Blood Tie for example - the figures are intangible and ghostlike and seem at once to emerge from the shadowy background and recede away from the colourful foreground. Caught between two worlds they suggest several possible readings: an ambiguous position in society; mystery and the mystical, traditionally associated with the "primitive"; and
Jane Wege, Return of the Ancestors. Photo: Peter Wege.
