Rook & Raven are pleased to welcome South African painter Lionel Smit back to the Gallery for his latest exhibition of new paintings, sculptures and etchings, entitled Cumulus.

Lionel Smit (B. 1982) was born in Pretoria, South Africa. He began exhibiting soon after graduating art school at Pro Arte Alphen Park, and now lives and works in Cape Town. He is best known for his contemporary portraiture, reinterpreted through monumental canvases and sculptures.

With his work centered heavily on identity, and realised through the formation of disparate layering and an overlapping of textures, Smit’s musing primarily captures that of the Cape Malay Community. Working from indeterminate models, his paintings are prepared via a heavily layered process of reworked tones and swatches of colour, that deftly reveal the subject from beneath the canvas’s surface.

“Smit’s process is adaptive, inventive, and physically engaged. He paints abstract canvases and lets them sit around the studio, ideas gestating, until he is ready to project photographs of the model on them … frequently reworking images multiple times, such that colour and line merge, breaking down both.” Lionel Smit: Dialogic Cumulus, 2014. Jason Rosenfeld, Ph.D., Distinguished Chair and Professor of Art History at Marymount Manhattan College, New York.

His gestural brushwork encourage a more profound engagement from viewers, creating a juxtaposing parallel within the painting, whereby two images can be seen in one; the beauty of the young female face from afar, and the bold Pollock-like painterly qualities layered onto the surface of the canvas when viewed up close.

Lionel describes the reasoning for the exhibition title, Cumulus, to be ‘like an end product of everything that I have been performing in the studio – translated into different mediums;’ following on from a recent show at Everard Read, Johannesburg in 2013, entitled Accumulation, this will be the first show in London to display a mix of two- and threedimensional works. Cumulus relates not solely to the physical part of mediums coming together, but also is translated from the time and ideas behind the process. For Lionel, the accumulation of time is evident in his pieces, the process being equally as important as the final result.

Lionel’s unique painterly lexicon translates effortlessly to the sculptural medium also, representing a mask from which these character’s flaws are intermittently hidden, yet symbolically bringing these imperfections to the surface with tangible ambiguity.

Smit's work has been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London, where it was chosen to be the 'face' of the BP Portrait Award in 2013. He was recently honoured with a Ministerial Award by the Department of Culture for Visual Art, and a highlight of his career has been the publication of one of his paintings on the cover of a recent Christie's auction house catalogue. Smit exhibits locally in South Africa also, where he is considered one of the country's youngest investment artists. Over the past ten years he has established a substantial international following with works in collections ranging from the Standard Chartered Bank to the Laurence Graff Art Collection at the Graff Delaire wine estate.

Rook & Raven Gallery
7 Rathbone Place
London W1T IHN United Kingdom
Ph. +44 (0)20 73230805
info@rookandraven.co.uk
www.rookandraven.co.uk

Opening hours
Tuesday - Friday from 11.00am to 6.30pm
Saturdays from 11.00am to 5.00pm

Related images

  1. Lionel Smit, Dissipate #1, 2014, Oil on Linen, 190 x 190 cm
  2. Lionel Smit, Review, 2014, Oil on Linen, 170 x 230 cm
  3. Lionel Smit, Cumulus #1, Oil on Linen, 190 x 190 cm