soft_horses (View)
When the N7 loses its memory at Noordoewer and starts calling itself the B1, you have arrived in Namibia, spacious and still, named after itself. Even if you have never turned left at Keetmanshoop and headed for Luderitz, even if you have never rolled along a road so steeped in silence and yourself that it is hard to remain behind your own eyes, you will i think understand. Even if you have never seen way off on the horizon, which runs as straight as a skirting board, first a cloud of dust and then, straining your eyes in an effort to understand the heavy distance, movement.
Someone told you about them, but you cannot say who. Perhaps it is one of those things that all of us know in ourselves. We need not be told. We understand, as if informed by a whisper, that those are wild horses racing across the floor of the desert, and even though it is impossible, you would see an ungroomed mane thrashing in the wind. Wild horses are much like mixed tenses.
They have been racing us from miles away, or perhaps they are not so frivolous. They seem to travel faster than cars. Where do they go in the desert in such haste?
On roads we travel, on rubber hooves. This hot black boundary separating a country from itself is the only place we are allowed to be. We may pass through the corridor of ourselves, but we may not stray from the road. The forbidden area is all around like a dead sea. How can all this be off limits, Zum Spergebied, all of it without exception, just on the off chance that we might get diamonds on the soles of our shoes?
It has been said that the images that make up the caution horses are simultaneously aestheticised and edgy, expressing as they do beauty and ruin. Stan Engelbrecht recognizes that these views are too complex for colour. It is through the black and white medium that he is able to transport the texture of this light filled moment to the doors of our perception. Our eyes are tricked into seeing rather than serving merely as a window for our emotional reaction. Far from the hysterics of colour, he has unlocked the intimate geography of the black and white photograph. Childishly, we wish to touch the picture.
Imaging is the controlled ruination of light sensitive objects. Through a darkening of the collective soul the world is lifted out of an exquisite and blind light, the cloud of unknowing. It is born into time. We have much in common with these images. We too are exposed.
Engelbrecht is himself light sensitive and it records as an understated compassion in his work. It is his edginess. He fears that he will show us nothing more than himself.
Despite his fears he gives us images of a certain density. The thickness of being is caught, but not crushed. He is chasing shadows with his looking box, because he senses that they will lead him to the substance.
Stan told me of a phenomenon observed in wild horses, whereby if you chase a horse for an extended period of time, let us say three days, and then you turn away, the horse will follow you. This process is repeated, this grasping and letting go until the capture, by this time made easy. It appears that the enforced intimacy of the hunt is irresistible to the horse and the horse is irresistible to the man.
Stan Engelbrecht does not want his images to bully our memory. He would rather seduce us and this is his childishness. Stan Engelbrecht has stepped off the road and caught the light falling on the myth. The images he brings us are made of nearness and rest, being and longing. They feel like freedom and vulnerability, holding together and loneliness. The desert itself is as self-effacing as ice about to melt. It melts away from his exertions leaving only light and horses, beauty and sadness. Beauty and sadness are perhaps the only true vehicle, or at least the greater vehicle, and indivisible. The cautionhorses resides in the spaces between the fences of morality. The cautionhorses offers us something other than heaven and hell and I for one am grateful. Our eyes will apportion notions such as these according to the design of our own hopes and fears, because some clich�s hold true.
Trenton Elsley from an essay on thecautionhorses.
Showcase
View soft_horsesAbout Stan Engelbrecht
Engelbrecht is a photographer / artist who divides his time between Johannesburg, a small desert town Aus in Namibia, and Cape Town, his base. He was born in 1976 in Vredendal in South Africa, and lead a largely nomadic existence with his parents until 1995 when he moved to Cape Town. Once in Cape Town he took up studying design, but soon fell for one of his subjects: photography. In no time he was teaching photography part-time to supplement his studying fees, and at the end of his four years took a full time position in the photographic department. After a year he escaped into the desert in 2000 to produce his first major solo show, thecautionhorses, on a herd of wild horses that live in the harsh Namibian desert. Returning to the desert again in 2001 to produce thecautionhorsesII, he had collected the material that was to become his first book � the caution horses. Engelbrecht is constantly commiting himself to new projects, and spends as much time as possible in his desert home in Namibia, close to his constant inspiration: the wild horses.
Engelbrecht has taken part in several solo and group exhibitions in both Cape Town and Johannesburg.
Engelbrecht has done numerous talks and lectures on the wild horses and his other projects around the country, including television and radio interviews, and many magazine and newspaper articles. Engelbrecht frequently collaborates with other artists and experiments with a wide range of media, such as digital video, many other digital media, site specific installation, sculpture, and even clothing production with his range gifthorse.
Contact
EmailTel : +27(0)82 928 6586