Arno Morland
Drifting thought into form
Perhaps my artworks are like thick plate glass behind which everything is temporarily silent and you cannot hear a thing.
To drift.
To sense.
To hold.
Arno is a South African artist whose work is inspired by a recognition of the ineluctable pathos of the human condition. Arno’s work is suffused with a deeply empathetic humor. His paintings and sculptures invite us to “zoom out” from the immediate parochial concerns of our everyday lives and consider the experience of being a living human being upon the earth. As if from afar.
In the course of his early studies in Psychology, Philosophy, and Theology, Arno came to appreciate the essential mystery of all being. Later turning to art, he found a language that did not try to capture all that is but instead seemed content to honor that which must always remain ineffable.
After completing a Master of Fine Arts degree, he spent many years living and working abroad in the US and UK before returning to South Africa. Now based near Cape Town, Arno continues his exploratory practice through both bronze sculpture and painting.
The world evoked in Arno’s paintings has a mysterious, dreamlike quality, as if to suggest that there might be something about a human life, indeed about reality itself, that resembles that oceanic state of being. His sculptures, created in bronze and often mounted on stone, offer a view of human life distilled down to its barest essentials. Awkward, almost childlike figures wonder at and try to come to terms with themselves, one another, and whatever it is that animates the whole business of living.
Arno’s sculptures and paintings always incorporate words. This is a deliberate and very important feature of his works. As he sees it, his works are brought into being and have their existence in the charged interplay between word and image.
Arno describes his artworks as “the very spot where you place your feet when you ask Scotty to beam you up.” In other words, they represent “an opportunity to look at yourself and the world you help color in from the vantage point of a temporarily out-of-body spaceship.”
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