Kleidoscope 1 (Sic) ,1971
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Note : The symbol of the circle or the orb-like form entered Christo Coetzee’s paintings in the late 1950s in the shape of found objects such as ping-pong balls, bicycle wheels and coins, and remained with Coetzee throughout his career. When these objets trouvés disappeared toward the end of the late 1960s, the circle as form remained and Coetzee used this shape to synthesise his work: to control it, to give it a form and a basis, as he explained in an interview with Linda Goodman in 1969.1 Coetzee’s exhibition that opened on Sunday, 28 March 1971 at the Goodman Gallery in Hyde Square, Johannesburg, was dominated by circles, by ‘circle shapes floating and orbiting in space’, as Die Vaderland2 reported in a review. Perhaps it was what Ballot labelled Coetzee’s fascination with ‘the multitude of mysteries and ideas distinctively associated with the circle as a perfect and closed unity and symbolic source of energy’3 that informed so many of the paintings in this exhibition, dealing with the cosmos, constellations and nature in both macroscopic and microscopic structures.
The titles of the individual works echo these manifestations: Venus, Sun 70/89, Snow Structure and the triptych Snowflake, of which Kleidoscope 1 is the first of three panels. On white canvas within the ubiquitous circle Coetzee created a hexagonal structure, reminiscent of a snow crystal, surrounded by irregular petal-like forms (the half of the infinity symbol that characterised his earlier work), textured by means of parallel hatching. At the time this painting was made Coetzee was living in Spain: aged 42 and at the zenith of his career in Europe; an established master of assemblage; a torchbearer of the avantgarde. The next year, in 1972, he returned to South Africa to settle in Tulbagh.
Johan Myburgh
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