Reclining nude
Robert Hodgins
Artwork 2007
Artwork: Robert Hodgins, Reclining nude (2007). Oil over charcoal, spray paint. Private collection.
Artist Robert Hodgins Title Reclining nude Date 2007 Materials Oil over charcoal, spray paint

b.1920, Dulwich; d.2010, Johannesburg

"For me,” the late Robert Hodgins said, “it is very simple. The act of painting at a particular moment is able, for reasons I neither understand, nor even try to understand, to open up the whole world of my experience, my thinking, my aspirations." It was only after Hodgins retired in the mid-80s, and took up painting full-time, that he established himself as a prominent and prolific artist. His paintings are saturated with the tumult of the time; his career as painter beginning in the final, violent decade of apartheid. His work offers not the didactic figuration of resistance art, but rather a nuanced reflection on all-too-human failings. At once expressive and spare, Hodgins’ paintings lean toward abstraction with an economy of both line and pigment. His painted scenes have about them – as the critic Ivor Powell wrote – an  “unbeautiful simplification,” a feeling for abbreviation, for suggestion rather than illustration. 

Somebody, nobody, no body
Lucienne Bestall

The present and implied figure in A4's inventory of artworks. – January 24, 2025

Path page
Somebody, nobody, no body
Lucienne Bestall
The present and implied figure in A4’s inventory of artworks. – January 24, 2025
Path page

A place to start: with personhood, with the most direct impression.

Indexical in medium, the figure named, their likeness legible.
David Goldblatt's black-and-white photograph 'Ephraim Zulu watering his garden, 179 Central Western Jabavu, Soweto. September' shows a man seated on a chair in a yard, holding a hosepipe. In the background is a dog and a woman.
Lindokuhle Sobekwa's photograph 'Zenandi' shows a child sitting on an outcropping of rock on a grassy hill.

A more oblique example of the same mode –
Artwork photograph that shows George Hallett’s framed monochrome photographic diptych ‘Peter Clarke’s Tongue’, from the Customs exhibition in A4’s Gallery, mounted on a white wall.

Another at the edge of effacement –
Artwork photograph that shows Dor Guez’s photographic print ‘Samira’ from the Customs exhibition in A4’s Gallery.

Then:

A less direct form, but still a resemblance. The sitters named, resolutely themselves. (Arranged in degrees of clarity: Dora Sowden, Terrence and Mom).

Things begin to slip.

Here, a name and the word 'portrait'. Portrait of Julia. But no likeness to speak of. Instead – gestures, thickness, muddy opacity.

Named again, an image of a historical figure denied by a child's eclipsing crayon.

There are others without overture to personhood, similarly obscured (struck through by whiteness or hidden beneath spreading blackness).

Still another, rendered faceless by fire.

Even the photographed figure at times resists the medium's ambitions to precisely transcribe their likeness, becoming ghostly and indistinct, given without name.

Or appearing as a portrait of absence –
Sabelo Mlangeni’s ‘Absence of Identities’, a black and white photograph that depicts the shadowed faces of a bride and groom.

There are then those figures that remain hidden, are disguised beneath cloth or bound in hazard tape. All betray the individual (or deity) beneath – in title or image.
A photograph of Christo's collotype print and collage 'Wrapped monument to Leonardo, Project for the Piazza Della Scala, Milan'.

Others are wholly absent, recalled in only the empty vessels of clothing: hats without heads, sleeves without limbs. Where some remember named individuals, others evoke anonymous figures.
Jo Ractliffe's monochrome photograph print 'Roadside stall on the way to Viana, from the series 'Terreno Ocupado'.
An installation photograph of Haroon Gunn-Salie and James Mathews' installation 'Amongst Men' shows casts of kufiyas suspended from the ceiling.
A photograph of Kevin Beasley's untitled resin, garment and umbrella sculpture standing on a concrete floor.

Present in degrees of likeness, or hidden, erased, obscured and absent – the body that is somebody and the body that is no body. There are others.
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