Michael Amery - Hemel en Aarde (solo) 2024

This exhibition is an extension of my ongoing exploration of beauty within the South African landscape. The subjects are alien vegetation and buildings rich with symbolism that we owe to the legacy of European settlers. Although foreign, these subjects have become iconic in the scenes that form my memories and images of home.

Grand churches are found in often otherwise unremarkable towns, where they are dwarfed by the land with which they compete for reverence. Having painstakingly measured them out and painted them, I can see the care and intricacy that goes into making these beautiful buildings. It’s as though we require art and beauty to access the transcendent and holy.

You can see what people care about by what they build. I feel faith and beauty have given way to industry. Our enlightenment away from spirituality, towards science and rationality, and the rise of technology, capitalism and excessive information, has only led to further unknowing, confusion, and disparity within communities at the mercy of this overarching complexity. This is what I see reflected in the land.

The land holds our history. We see our former naive understanding and disregard for delicate ecosystems, and our current inability to save them. We see Apartheid, past and present, and our inability to create equality. We see our former and current domination and control through mass agriculture and urbanisation.

We once dotted our shores and towns with beacons of a Western hope and civilisation in the expansive land and sea, whereas now we are permanently connected to infinite information and disconnected from the land and from each other. Our attempts to manufacture beauty are no longer spiritual, but rather commercial. And in reality, natural beauty suffers in the face of individual pursuits, where we compete to fit into systems that are human made but feel beyond humankind’s control.

Yet our existence seems completely fleeting when up against the brute objectivity of nature, where there is no fair or unfair, no human law or moral alignment. Rather there is only absurdity, and the oscillation between order and chaos, abundance and scarcity. Beyond us there is quiet, there is infinite time, nothingness and a reverent beauty.