I Can Never Sleep on Sundays
8 — 21 December 2010
Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape Town
The implicit representational ambiguity in Chapman’s work engenders a curious act of looking. There is the dislocation of memory from the specificity of place and yet a relocation at the same time – somewhere in the space of dreaming. Chapman’s images situate the viewer firmly within the labyrinth of city streets with no names, evoking a tension with the potential to fantasize ‘reading’ the city from a vantage point on high. De Certeau remarks in Walking in the City (1984) that as city practitioners we live below the thresholds of a celestial visibility. We are the walkers, the writers, of the city. It is our movements, our memories and our fantasies that shape the lived experience of space. A single space can hold the potential for so many variants of fantasy. In Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972) Marco Polo regales an aging Kublai Khan with tales of the cities he has seen in his travels. It soon becomes clear that each of these fantastic places is really the same place. ‘Desires are already memories,’ Marco Polo remarks of Isidora, the dreamed-of city that contained him as a young man. He says of the city of Zaira that ‘as this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands.’
Chapman’s city is such a sponge, a limitless resource of re-imaginings in paint. It is the city where the artifice of memory simultaneously crumbles and is re-imagined.
Extract from ‘Latent Horizon’ (2010) by Natasha Norman
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George Chapman, ‘Untitled I (I Can Never Sleep on Sundays)’ (2010). Oil on canvas. 110 x 140 cm. Photo by Grant Arendse
George Chapman, ‘Untitled II (I Can Never Sleep on Sundays)’ (2010). Oil on canvas. 102.5 x 120 cm. Photo by Grant Arendse
George Chapman, ‘Untitled III (I Can Never Sleep on Sundays)’ (2010). Oil on canvas. 110 x 140 cm. Photo by Grant Arendse
George Chapman, ‘Untitled IV (I Can Never Sleep on Sundays)’ (2010). Oil on canvas. 121 x 181 cm. Photo by Grant Arendse
George Chapman, ‘Untitled IX (I Can Never Sleep on Sundays)’ (2010). Oil on canvas. 80 x 170 cm. Photo by Grant Arendse
George Chapman, ‘Untitled V (I Can Never Sleep on Sundays)’ (2010). Oil on board. 100 x 100 cm. Photo by Grant Arendse
George Chapman, ‘Untitled VI (I Can Never Sleep on Sundays)’ (2010). Oil on canvas. 120 x 180 cm. Photo by Grant Arendse
George Chapman, ‘Untitled VII (I Can Never Sleep on Sundays)’ (2010). Oil on canvas. 140 x 128 cm. Photo by Grant Arendse
George Chapman, ‘Untitled VIII (I Can Never Sleep on Sundays)’ (2010). Oil on canvas. 140 x 140 cm. Photo by Grant Arendse
George Chapman, ‘Untitled X (I Can Never Sleep on Sundays)’ (2010). Oil on board. 60 x 60 cm. Photo by Grant Arendse
George Chapman, ‘Untitled XI (I Can Never Sleep on Sundays)’ (2010). Oil on canvas. 51 x 60 cm. Photo by Grant Arendse
George Chapman, ‘Untitled XII (I Can Never Sleep on Sundays)’ (2010). Oil on board. 60 x 60 cm. Photo by Grant Arendse
George Chapman, ‘Untitled XIII (I Can Never Sleep on Sundays)’ (2010). Oil on board. 60 x 60 cm. Photo by Grant Arendse
George Chapman, ‘Untitled XIV (I Can Never Sleep on Sundays)’ (2010). Oil on board. 60 x 60 cm. Photo by Grant Arendse
George Chapman, ‘Untitled XIX (I Can Never Sleep on Sundays)’ (2010). Oil on board. 60 x 60 cm. Photo by Grant Arendse
George Chapman, ‘Untitled XV (I Can Never Sleep on Sundays)’ (2010). Oil on board. 60 x 60 cm. Photo by Grant Arendse
George Chapman, ‘Untitled XVI (I Can Never Sleep on Sundays)’ (2010). Oil on canvas. 75 x 75 cm. Photo by Grant Arendse
George Chapman, ‘Untitled XVII (I Can Never Sleep on Sundays)’ (2010). Oil on canvas. 40 x 40 cm. Photo by Grant Arendse
George Chapman, ‘Untitled XVIII (I Can Never Sleep on Sundays)’ (2010). Oil on canvas. 40 x 40 cm. Photo by Grant Arendse
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