CATALOGUE TEXT

 And everything turned itself inside out 24 very short stories about Andrew Verster 1. Yellow. Afternoon light streaming in through the window. Andrew Verster sitting in his kitchen. The wall is painted bright yellow, gently mottled, suggesting ochre. It looks as if it has always been that colour, as if no other colour would do. We talk between the silences. 2. Cacophony. Outside Andrew’s house in Musgrave Road, the sky goes mad at dusk. It is the specific sound of birds in trees near shopping centres, a high pitched metallic shriek of a million voices - somehow more cacophonic, more disturbed, than the same sound in the bushveld. 3. Talking with Hands. The stars are laughing tears into Andrew’s sometimes paisley heart. I am thinking of his images of hands and arms and feet and bodies. Paintings and drawings which contain the world, whole universes. Now all stories belong to all people. 4. Musgrave Centre. It somehow makes perfect sense that Andrew Verster lives opposite Musgrave Centre in Durban. He is the very antithesis of mall culture. Still, I can easily picture him walking through the milling crowd. I imagine his gait to reflect restrained impatience. 5. Studio. Skylights provide the benchmark of colour. Paintings are everywhere. On the floor, the overflow of everything is diffracted into countless tiny splatters of paint, multicoloured constellations. This is the painted space in which the residues of Andrew Verster and Aidan Walsh’s work process accrete. It is in a sense a true marriage of true brushes. 6. Tattoos. We are still waiting for Andrew to get a tattoo. It seems inevitable. Which probably means it will never happen. 7. Aidan Walsh. Aidan is Andrew’s life partner and best friend who lives with him in their double story Edwardian house. An acclaimed painter of landscapes, his work lays claim to a hyper-reality in which time layers itself upon itself in perfect big sky blues. He and Andrew have not had an exhibition together in 40 years. This year, breaking the pattern, they exhibited work in the same gallery – the KNZSA in Durban - at the same time. 8. Espresso Pot. A talk with Andrew always includes a pot of coffee. It is always made in an old school Italian espresso pot and often decanted into another pot. The grounds that accumulate on the bottom of the filter and around the seal are not washed away. The result is a metallic tang in the coffee notes that is tenured to the metallic clash of bird-tongue outside. 9. Process. For Andrew the process of painting remains a process of discovery, even after decades of engaging with the canvas. The finished work is never completely premeditated, as he allows the universe to show him things he didn’t know he knew. 10. Seventy-One. Andrew is turning seventy-one this year. This seems absurd. 11. The Visible Spectrum. Andrew increasingly uses colours that are about to slide off the visible spectrum, colours that hum and vibrate. The result is often that our sense of depth and dimension is interrupted. 12. Orientation. I have interviewed Andrew many times and spoken more casually many more. We have never devoted much conversation to matters of sexuality. We both agree that we don't think it matters much. At the same, I can’t help thinking that it informs everything we do. 13. Swimming pool. Between the yellow of the kitchen and the white of the studio is the shimmering blue, a flag of water, a swimming pool. The water is not separate from the light which it reflects. As Verster paints – every day, all day – the water’s ripples accompany him, fluid, chaotic order, the waving matters that defines all of reality. 14. Openings. Andrew is nearly always at exhibition openings. His gaze is both supportive and properly critical. He is not a hobnobber and usually arrives early and disappears early. 15. Hinduism. Faith, cosmology and history - we bind them up together, tell ourselves what is true. Andrew professes his religious belief to be Hinduism, with its full-spectrum acknowledgement of the everything. In recent years, it has become almost impossible to separate his work from his Hinduism. The overflowing cornucopia of the universe seems to be his major concern, and even when it is invisible, the Hindu pantheon of infinity is always present. 16. Durban. The city in which Andrew Verster lives. A place, it seems, that is his halfway house between birth and India. Not only because of its obvious Indian connections, but because it is a city that is a visual, spiritual and cultural polyphony. It is also a place that artists often leave, despite the fact that it is one of this country’s most fecund pools of talent. They leave for bigger things, for foreign narratives, and because it difficult for young talent to sell work in Durban. 17. Theatre. Andrew is a persistent patron of good theatre. When he is particularly impressed with a play, he sends me an email, telling me why I should see it. 18. Multidisciplinary. Andrew Verster walking through walls that he doesn’t even know are there. 19. Priest. There is something both priest-like and highly secular about Andrew. Evangelical and sceptical. Pragmatic and pure. He takes joy in life’s contradictions and understands the difference between distance and cynicism. I once referred to him in print as Durban’s patron saint of the arts. For that he thanked me. 20. The Eraser Story. Andrew tells me the story of a young Chinese schoolboy who had got into trouble for making holes in his eraser. When it came to eraser inspection at the boy’s school, he was severely castigated for the object’s Swiss-cheese disposition. Andrew thinks he should have been celebrated for his difference. 21. Indian Delights. I sat and talked to Andrew for some hours one day, recording our words onto magnetic tape. Later that day I was at Impress Printers in Springfield Park, where the factories have congregated in slight disguise, pretending not to be factories but slick corporate headquarters. I was checking the colour on a print job and I couldn’t help noticing some A0 sheets impositioned with pages from the local culinary classic Indian Delights for which Andrew did the illustrations. They are printers’ test sheets, and have been re-used between plates to clean the print rollers. The result is layers of words, recipes and images superimposed on each other. The sheets are beautiful, perfectly redolent of everything. I tell the technician how beautiful they are. He lets me take two sheets. One for Andrew. One for me. 22. Blue. An antechamber between Andrew’s lounge and his kitchen is painted a deep blue that chooses not to pulsate. It is the colour of night swimming, of star strewn skies addended by moonlight. 23. Departure. When I leave Andrew’s house I know I will return. When we leave this world, I think we might return. 24. Everything. Stories about everything and nothing make us what we are, provide the illusions we need to exist. But just because they are illusions does not mean that they are not beautiful.