Luan Nel
“…rather than convey solitude and introspection, Nel’s wind-blown, up-in-the-air narative of falling leaves has me looking to the horizon, reaching for hope and optimism once again”
— Sandra Botnen, curator
“A Landscape belongs to no-one in perpetuity, and yet, this is exactly the case, instead it belongs to us all in the moment.”
Day 29 features South African artist Luan Nel. I decided to reach out to Nel because everywhere I look these days, I am seeing South African artists. I am not going to gallery openings due to Covid, so I can’t tell if South Africa is a thing right now, or if it is just what my search engine is feeding me. I decided to call artist and gallery owner Luan Nel to find out what is going on. Here is what happened.
Historically speaking, what I describe is nothing new. "The art movement around apartheid gave South Africa a distinct voice that resonated around the world,” say Luan Nel. “We are used to garnering attention, and in hard times we gain even more attention.” Nel looks to what he thinks will be difficult future and has been bad governments of the past. In times like these, when systems fail us, art naturally comes to the fore. “And people are listening,” he adds. “Or, maybe South Africans artists just shout a bit louder,” he says with a laugh.
Luan Nel’s gallery is located on one of the best streets in Cape Town. He opened just months before Covid and considering circumstances, he is doing surprisingly well. His vision for the gallery borders on philanthropy. He cares deeply about artist relationships and if he can do nothing more than change the power dynamic, and not talk down to artists, he says he will have accomplished something important. Coming from a generation of Post-Structuralist/Post-Modernist artists who were taught to do as many things as possible, it is a natural step for Nel to jump into the business of curating and selling art. “I have never subscribed to the artist-as-genius working in isolation. And I have always written my own press releases” he says.
Image; masks in storefront window. His view form the gallery, an ironic nod to “inauthentic” African Masks.
Nel is a dynamic and charismatic communicator. Our conversation moves between subjects as vast as drag as a form of “identity lifting”, to land ownership in South Africa. He has always had left leaning political views and, “as an artist, my voice is a queer voice,” he says. In the same broad stroke, he addresses colonialism, saying as a South African, it is something we have to contend with on a daily basis. At some point I make an effort to move the conversation to his artwork where his multifaceted ideas comes together as a well-rounded point-of-view.
“I guess you could consider me a landscape painter, but really I do anything -video, installations, or whatever the project takes.” The politics of his paintings are not overt, but he has come to the conclusion ownership is not a fixed concept “All you really own is the view in front of you. Not the land, just the view and what you see. This same view will belong to anybody else, once I vacate this exact space for it to be occupied by another. A Landscape belongs to no-one in perpetuity, and yet, this is exactly the case, instead it belongs to us all in the moment.” he says.
Luan Nel wakes up every morning at 4:30am to see the sunrise and what he describes as the most hopeful time of day. He posts a picture of the sunrise every morning as an artistic gesture in and of itself, then paints landscapes of “#luansview”. Some of his ‘pandemic painting’ series depict the same view of the city from his home studio balcony, but they are filled with windblown leaves illustrating an everything-up-in-the-air quality brought on by the pandemic.
He adds to the conversation, “I belong to the rainbow generation. I lived the euphoria of 1994 when apartheid finally ended. The Berlin Wall had already come down and we had nothing but hope and optimism. It may have been naïve, but it was real, just as real as the cynicism of today.” Hope and optimism remain Luan Nel’s nature, but his outlook is no longer so. “Twenty-seven years later and we are once again just as divided as before. But this time we are poorer than before.”
Our conversation circles back to address the current attention on South African art. I feel like I have found a friend in Luan Nel, someone who believes as whole-heartedly as I do, that art holds things together when all other systems fail. I feel affinity for what he describes as the ill effects of divisiveness and how it affects his experience as an artist in South African. I leave the conversation appreciating not just the skill of his paintings, but the concept that holds his landscapes together as a cohesive body of work. Falling leaves in the foreground draw our attention to nature’s cycles. Paying closer attention to nature, placing it more in the foreground of our lives, appears to be a trademark of 2020. But rather than convey solitude and introspection, Nel’s wind-blown, up-in-the-air narrative has me looking to the horizon, reaching for hope and optimism once again.