Carla Busuttil / Post-National Bliss / 2013

Goodman Gallery Cape Town is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by South African-born and UK-based artist Carla Busuttil. In her first exhibition in Cape Town, titled Post-National Bliss, the artist imagines and explores the rituals and conflicts of a fictional world perpetually on the brink of chaos.

Busuttil writes: “This world is flat, and its inhabitants are a generation lost: unhinged aristocrats, powerless lawmen, scoundrel children, otherworldly victims – all lurching towards some unrecorded fate. It is a time after history. Left in the wake of this carnival of unseen faces lies a dystopian vacuum consumed by superstition and fervour. This imagined future (or alternative present) is a world derived from history but extrapolated to an exaggerated end.”

In Busuttil’s vivid and unsettling canvases and watercolors, figures and images from the edges of historical and current events are edited, divorced from prior context and re-imagined in a different world where new histories are allowed to emerge. In an accompanying video piece, titled No More History, figures from this world recur and jostle for attention. The mask appears as a motif throughout the exhibition, acting alternately as a disguise, a symbol of identification, and an object that bestows power, and freedom.