“Andre Naude, above all, concerns himself with the process of painting, with his inimitable palette that uses the most unassuming colours in such a way that they dance with energy and glow with richness. His secret compassion for his sharp-voiced leitmotif, for the paint and colour, results in a visual internationalism, a quality of work that transcends the possibility of ever being called endemic of myopic.

Alarmed logs and branches ready to bite you, quiet and hostile vases standing in ambush, slate paving in revolt, wrought-iron bristling with enmity. All painted with such relish that you want to touch them and mollify them, to tame them and take them home to sleep on your couch. The darkness disguised with seductive colour and luscious painterly marks, a dichotomy of fatalistic protest and an optimism of hope.

Naude paints the way Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes. A magical seeing and hearing the mundane and transforming it into a feast of brush mark and of colour, into something apart from its inspiration, existing in its own right in terms of beauty, of line and colour and form. The story is in the telling, bitter and delicious like chocolate: telling the bad news with the most exquisite language, the magician who gets cynical brown to shimmer with Alice blue.

One can say reminiscent of Matisse and Picasso, but should rather say: reminiscent of Naude. It is work that is entirely itself and its creator.”

Wilna Panagos 

Johann Moolman was born and schooled in Johannesburg.

He studied art at the then Johannesburg College of Art and during 1975-1976 completed post-graduate studies at St Martin’s School of Art in London, majoring in sculpture.

From 1978 – 1989 Moolman lectured in sculpture and printmaking at the University of South Africa, Department of Fine Art.

During 1990 – 1996 he was a Senior Lecturer in the Fine Art Department, University of the North West, where he ran the Sculpture Department and also lectured drawing and history of art.

Since 1997 he has been living and working as a full-time artist in Groot-Marico, North-West Province.