FOX PRETORIUS

BLACK STATIC PAINTINGS / 2022 - (ONGOING)

Black Static is an ongoing body of work across different media that explores the relationship between structure, interruption, and everyday ritual within contemporary urban life. Working primarily in monochrome and reduced colour palettes, these paintings move between abstraction and figurative abstraction, drawing on familiar objects, interior spaces, and architectural fragments as points of departure.

Rather than functioning as traditional still life, these objects operate as carriers of tension and memory — forms that register the rhythms of daily experience while reflecting the psychological spaces we inhabit. Coffee devices, technological objects, and spatial structures appear not as representations of specific moments, but as compressed signals of presence, routine, and change.

Across the series, forms often tilt, fragment, or partially dissolve. Systems appear held together while simultaneously under pressure. Through this shifting balance between stability and disruption, the work traces the subtle dynamics embedded in contemporary environments and the rituals that shape them.

The term Black Static refers both to a visual language and a conceptual framework. It suggests the simultaneous presence of signal and interference — clarity interrupted by noise, structure held within instability. The paintings explore this tension through layered mark-making, compressed spatial relationships, and recurring object-based motifs that move between observation and abstraction.

Emerging from earlier landscape-based abstraction developed in the Pendoring series, the Black Static works extend these concerns into the context of the contemporary city. In these works, everyday objects become contemporary markers of presence and absence — structures through which the shifting tensions of urban life are observed, held, and reassembled.

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PENDORING PAINTINGS / 2019 - 2022

The Pendoring paintings and related prints form a prelude within my broader painting practice and continue to inform the visual language developed in the Black Static works. Inspired by the thorn trees (Acacia karroo) characteristic of the Klein Karoo landscape in South Africa where I grew up, these paintings explore interruption, resilience, and navigation through space as both physical and psychological experience.

While originating in landscape memory, the structural tensions present in this series remain central to my later work, where similar ideas reappear through contemporary still-life objects, interior spatial fragments, and urban environments.

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