Exploring human-equine connections in art

Last weekend I took my children to Avontuur Wine Estate, between Stellenbosch and Somerset West at the foot of the Helderberg. It’s as picturesque as you’d expect: white-fenced horse paddocks spread out between vineyards, with Table Mountain and False Bay in the background.

We decided to see the horses up close. My daughter obligingly climbed onto a fence to pose for a photo. It was at this point that I saw the thin electric cables running alongside the wooden poles — and as I rushed to pull her off we both got an almighty shock. Within a minute we were laughing about it, but the episode offered a salutary warning: don’t get so distracted by sublime vistas that you miss the signs telling you not to touch the fence!

There is a wider lesson to be learned here ( important in a place of exquisite and almost overwhelming beauty like the

Winelands) about the risks of romanticising a landscape, as well as the people and animals occupying it.

In an SA context, as around the world, histories of labour exploitation, disenfranchisement and displacement preclude a purely lyrical response to cultivated terrain. And agriculture is not always an ecological good. Moreover, most of us urbanites have no

real idea of the pragmatic and technical aspects to farming or breeding that leave little place for sentiment.

Avontuur is not just a producer of wine; it is also the home of an internationally renowned stud farm. If, like me, you’re not a horsey person, then though these beautiful beasts are the stuff of archetype — invoking a mixed bag of symbolic associations, from nobility and bravery to freedom, speed and power — they readily fall into a category of secondary details in an imagined idyll. A horse in a pasture completes a rural scene.

Within the equine world, on the other hand, it is the scenery that becomes irrelevant. Horse breeding is all about bloodlines and stock and sires: stallions whose purpose is, in that bland euphemistic phrase, to “cover” mares and make champion racers. It can all seem rather mechanical. What room is there for emotion? For aesthetics?

As it happens, January has been an emotionally and aesthetically intense period for

the Avontuur community. Art & Equus, an exhibition that opened last week in the Barrel Cellar venue adjoining the Avontuur Restaurant, includes the work of various sculptors, painters and photographers who have taken horses as their subjects.

The launch of the exhibition at this time is particularly poignant, however, because it comes as the Avontuur stud team is mourning the loss of their champion sire, Var.

General manager Pippa Mickleburgh paid tribute to Var, who died at the age of 23, as her “best friend ”— a horse who “changed the lives of racing and non-racing folk both in SA and across the world”. Var’s keeper, Berthwell Arosi, described himself as “lost” after the death of his “special horse”.

Such human-equine connections are what lend the figure of the horse its significance in a long history of representation in art and literature. Art & Equus contributes to this tradition by presenting works that by turns conform to and resist the familiar artistic treatment of horses.

Robin Kutinyu’s bronze and resin sculptures convey a sense of motion — the rippling of skin and muscle, the shimmer of a coat — in their texture; a trot or a gallop is rendered through the deliberate incompleteness and fragmentation of each piece.

Tarryn Stebbing’s acrylic paintings play with movement and stasis through clashing colours and hints of cubistim pressionist disruption.

Contrasting these works are Riaan van Zyl’s Perfect Motion and his Film Reel series, using oil, charcoal, anthracite and pastels to capture the depth, shadow, blurring and symmetry of racehorses and their riders neck-and-neck. Van Zyl’s style alludes to the cinematic appeal of horses at full pace, complementing the black-andwhite realism of photographs by Liesl King, Candiese Lenferna and Chase Liebenberg.

These images range from the visual drama of horses racing in the snow to more playful moments (rollicking on the beach) and horses in quiet philosophical mode — usually when munching on grass or hay.