After De Jongh
Johan Myburg’s opening address
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The best way, I think, is by starting is to say, ‘welcome back to Johannesburg, Hentie’. Both to Johannesburg and to Wits, your alma mater.
It has been a while since Hentie has shown work in Johannesburg. The last big solo was Figuring in 2008 at the Goodman. That same year he was also the winner of the Sasol Wax Award. In 2015 he had a presence at the Turbine Art Fair – not as exhibiting artist but in the capacity of curator of Emerging Painters: Graduate Show, featuring some of the best post-graduate painting from fine arts’ departments across South Africa.
At that time Hentie was head of the Masters’ Programme at the Department of Visual Arts at Stellenbosch University.
Perhaps this foray into a world of painting was indicative of a passion and training lying dormant for many years. In his undergraduate studies he was trained as a painter at Wits, by people like Clive van den Berg and Penny Siopis, but chose to focus on photography and printmaking for many years.
Just before COVID he returned to painting. “I think it was a result of my personal growth and path and the type of very complex nature of painting that has led me at that stage of my life to my current obsession with this medium, especially oil paint,” he says.
Initially Selfshots followed, a series in watercolour exploring digital self-portraiture, isolation, and identity, translating private, user-generated cell phone and mirror selfies from social media into intimate, hand-drawn or painted artworks. The series developed during the severe COVID-19 lockdowns, and the portraits shifted in meaning, taking on a deeper sense of human isolation, loneliness, and the digital desire to connect.
A couple of years ago Hentie started posting landscapes on Instagram and Facebook.
“Mountain landscape with stream after Tinus de Jongh”, watercolour on paper, appeared in in late 2023, and drawings in charcoal and polychrome pencil on paper. Early 2024 “Mountain landscape with stream after Tinus de Jongh” in oil on canvas emerged, one of the first works, dark and with energetic brushstrokes, in a new body of work – in conversation of Tinus de Jongh.
Think of Tinus de Jongh and oil paintings of dramatic mountains and Cape farmyards come to mind. That he was a particularly diligent artist is evident from the large number of works circulating in the secondary art market – there are indications of more than 1 500 (which also include etchings). And multiple reproductions of his work – some of which are shown in the installation Hentie has assembled.
De Jongh who was born in 1885 in Amsterdam and died in Bloemfontein in 1942, arrived in South Africa in 1921, working in a sober style within the Dutch tradition. The light and landscape of South Africa soon caused him to abandon his muted palette in favour of more saturated colours. His formulaic approach to painting Cape landscapes – images intended for ‘diverting and pleasing the eye’ in populist, fictive and saccharine berge, klowe and kranse, as Hayden Proud observed – created such a demand that he abandoned his considered brushwork in favour of a broader palette knife technique. Soon he developed a technique in which he applied lighter colours of oil paint on top of wet dark paint – a technique that enabled him to work quickly (and produce more work).
Most of the works in this exhibition refer to a single painting by De Jongh: Bloekomlaan (Avenue of Gum Trees) – a symmetrical depiction of an avenue of eucalyptus trees, viewed from the vantage point of the shaded dirt road below. The road literally cleaves the picture plane in two, leading the eye toward a farmhouse in the distance.
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This brings us to After De Jongh – not a tribute exhibition, but a collection of works focusing on paint as a carrier of memories and emotion rather than composition.
“Both the motif of the avenue of blue gums and De Jongh’s broader oeuvre serve as fulcrums for the identity and cultural imagination of the Afrikaner over the past century,” Hentie says. “Both epitomize the foundational ideology of apartheid’s traumatic crescendo. This is an inherited burden that I, as a gay Afrikaner who grew up in its shadow, carry with me – a demand for penance for a history in which I played no active part.”
A collection of landscapes, so one would assume, but in true Van der Merwe style, so much more than mere landscapes.
‘At the core of much of Hentie van der Merwe’s work is the body: its power, vulnerability, sexuality, objectification; its memory and its concealment; its capacity for violence or intimacy; the body as it exists or is represented publicly and privately, symbolically and commercially.’
This assessment of Hentie’s work was made by Tracy Murinik in 2004 – and 20 odd years later the body is still at the core of Hentie’s work. Clearly, and with the reference to De Jongh, these works are read as landscapes, but then as embodied landscapes – as landscapes containing the body: its power, vulnerability, sexuality, objectification; its memory and its concealment…
The brush as an extension of the hand has been abandoned to free the hand to paint, to apply paint to the canvas with hands and fingers through a wide range of gestures – from the gentle caress of fingertips to the forceful momentum of fists, from the quivering palm of the hand slightly out of focus (returning to the blur as a technique in those cibachrome prints of soldiers’ uniforms as in Transvaal Horse Artillery from the early 2000s), to mark making resembling both landscape and a sort of camouflage to conceal (returning to the camouflage works on Figuring in 2008 where he seemed to identify land with inevitable embodied conflict).
Painting with his hands and fingers creates an intimate bond between body and the burden of lineage – embodied by the motif of the avenue of blue gums and De Jongh. The body offers an escape from this burden, a sensory relief. This symmetrically ordered heritage, as manifested in the motif of the avenue with its romantic, atmospheric palette, is no natural match for the body. The body, and by extension subjectivity, is anything but symmetrically defined; it is rather undefinable, fraught with contradictions, tension, and queer pleasure. Resulting in images that are chaotic, abstract, proses-driven, devoid of ordering principles such as fore-, middle- and background.
‘By coming into direct contact with the oil paint, feeling its cool, smooth texture against my skin, I ground myself in the present,’ Hentie says. ‘This is an attempt to free myself from the past – if that is at all possible – or at least to reckon with it, forging alternative narratives and experiences of the contemporary moment.’
This process amounts to what the British conceptual artist Anish Kapoor calls ‘the act of archaic alchemy’. In a recent interview Kapoor was talking about painting and specifically referring to Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, he remarked, ‘in my view paint is just a replacement for the real material: blood and semen’.
Painting by hand he is intensely aware of the symbolism embedded in each part of the hand: the ring finger for love; the middle finger for contempt, resistance, and rebellion; and the palms for intimacy and destiny. ‘This is countered by its binary companion, self-determination, which I explore through clenched fists – gestures that naturally evoke violence, alongside social resistance and unity.
By placing paint as a carrier for visceral emotions on a canvas Hentie constitutes an act of fundamental transformation, turning outer landscapes into inner worlds – loaded with personal histories and demons.
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We hardly ever create from nothing, nor do we create in isolation. Behind us is always a tradition and a history, an art history with people who in turn responded to their circumstances, seen through the lenses of their lived experiences. Sometimes that tradition is expansive, with many possibilities that follow. Often that tradition is oppressive and limiting. Which offers possibilities too. To make art is to constantly investigate, to interrogate and to expand possibilities of meaning, to take the conversation about the landscape and the body further, forging alternative narratives and experiences of the contemporary moment.
After De Jongh fits the Hentie van der Merwe trajectory to the extent that the body is still at the core: its power, vulnerability, sexuality, objectification; its memory and its concealment…
Congratulations Hentie. What a powerful body of work.
Johannesburg, July 2026