In the paintings in Wilderness, Layzell’s most recent show, flickers of colour emerge from dark backgrounds. Abstract greens and whites create landscapes from the corner of your eye.

The painting facing the street, on the show-wall of Salon 91, shows an abstracted landscape. It is constructed with strokes of Barbie-pinks, deep foreboding purples, guttural greens and hazy whites. It is immediately recognisable as a scene from nature, although when one inspects the piece, it shifts, changes into something else: something slippery, ephemeral. A description which mirrors my initial take away from the show. The full understanding of it just beyond my cognizance, like a name caught on the tip of your tongue. The exhibition, housed in Salon 91’s intimate show room, collects Cathy Layzell’s abstract landscapes and scenes from the wild.

What strikes one first about the work is the rich, surprising, colour of it. Somehow, acidic Barbie pinks, purples and whites are made to look completely at home among scenes of nature. Or, if not at home, they look no less alien than the mossy greens, calm browns and deep black that one may expect of nature. In the same way that one may realise that ever-blue sky is, indeed, sometimes orange, one realises that a bush may, indeed, have elements of purple and pink. All of this colour inspection (or introspection) is done before one even starts to examine Layzell’s brush strokes where you may, as I did, realise that the large pink blotch is actually laced with specks of blue, silver and green or that some innocuous green patch is actually a myriad of hues, swatches and vibrancies.

The mood of the pieces shifts as you move along the show, at times sombre and, at others, frantic. If there is any commonality in mood or tone between the pieces, it is found in a respect or a reverence for nature. There is something akin to the Romantic feelings of insurmountable odds or an unstoppable invasion in nature: the feeling of power beyond comprehension. The scenes are somehow separate from us. A distinction between here and there is created and we are given a brief glimpse into the there of the wild. As in all fairy tales, the hero must travel into the proverbial woods in order to achieve his or her objective and achieve enlightenment or absolution. In the same way that the hero must journey through the woods, I think we, as the viewers, must journey through the colour, strokes, and conception in order to find ourselves at the other end of understanding.

Like Seurat’s Pointillism, Layzell’s pieces force the viewer to engage with the gestalt: the organised whole that is more than the sum of its parts. The viewer must step back in order to observe the wholeness of the piece. Unlike Pointillism, however, the pieces from Wilderness do not demand macro or micro viewing alone, but instead create an interchange, fluid, dichotomy of experiences. That is, one can either step back and view the gestalt or one can step in and see the micro artwork created by bold varying stokes of colour. It seems ambiguous whether one is supposed to view the work from afar or close. As with the experience of nature, I suppose, the solution probably lies somewhere in the middle.

It must be noted that the idea of an abstracted landscape is hardly novel. Abstract landscapes have been around for years. While the idea of an abrstract landscape is more accurately exemplified by Gerhard Richter’s various Abstrakt Bilder (Abstract Paintings) in the 1950s, the prototypes for an abstract landscapes can be seen as early as Wassily Kandinsky’s Winter Landscape, or even in post-impressionist Vincent Van Gogh. Perhaps the most famous examples belonging being Cezanne’s many views of Montagne Saint Victoire. In the later years, the lines of these views are almost entirely replaced by ideas of volume, leaving the viewer with a sense of the magnitude of his views instead of a sense of the shapes of the view. In Wilderness, the experiment is continued with both line and volume being removed, leaving only colour and movement. In Waterfall: Phantom Pass I all we are given is movement. The image suggests a powerful multi-tiered waterfall, but does not actually provide any concrete image with which to recognise the object. There is also no reference of scale. All the viewer is given is colour, and a white deluge slightly off centre with which to create the scene. Impossibly, however, the scene is created. As it turns out, precise, subtle, suggestion is all that is needed to create the scene. In many ways, this piece exemplifies the exhibition, as the show seems to hold as its thesis an exploration into the limits of representation: the extent to which one can create cohesive images without actually using representation.

The exhibition, is an exploration of, and into, abstraction of nature, which is, perhaps, a comment in itself on our views of the wild. The wild, the wilderness, has become an abstract concept instead of a harsh truth of survival. Housed in the comfortable walls of Salon Ninety One on charming Kloof street, the wilderness in the show is all the wild we are likely to be exposed to. Thus, it is nothing more than an abstract idea to most: something to be toyed with or, at most, to dip one’s toes into. Few of us will experience the fight for survival in nature. Instead, we are in our own wilderness. A wilderness made not of plants, trees and water, but of café’s, jobs, information and commerce. It is perhaps here, in this train of thought, that we find the purpose of her neon non-natural colours. These strange colours, although natural in the paintings, would seem more at home in a dystopian metropolitan alleyway with neon lights and shady characters. In this way, the works ensure that we never truly get away from the idea of the city, that, even in the wild, we are tied to the city, to the throbbing mess of humanity.

Wilderness is an exploration of nature, of abstraction and of our relationship towards the wild. With strange colours, shapes, movements and strokes, Layzell takes the viewer on a sophisticated journey of nothing less that the battle of people vs. nature. And while I do not feel the closure of a fairy tale ending, I feel that these pieces have certainly taken me through the woods and out the other side.

Rafael Powell is a freelance writer and editor with experience in the art industry. He works and lives in Cape Town, South Africa. He is the creator and editor of AmpersandOnline.