Huis met veranda - Ou Kaapstad 1967

This is a painting of ‘Huis met veranda - Ou Kaapstad’ by Gregoire Boonzaier, and it's all about that thick, juicy oil paint, laid on with an almost sculptural gusto. Boonzaier isn’t just painting a scene; he's building a world, brick by brick, stroke by stroke. Look at how he renders the buildings, like they're emerging from the earth itself. The texture is so rich, you can practically feel the sun-baked walls of old Cape Town. Then there's the sky, a patchwork of blues and whites, dabbed on with a kind of joyful abandon. It's like he's saying, "Here, have some sky, slathered on thick!" There's a real dance happening between representation and abstraction, isn't there? It’s a conversation between the real and the imagined, the seen and the felt. Boonzaier reminds me a little of early Braque with the raw and earthy quality of the paint handling. He embraces the accidental, the messy, the unresolved. And in that, there's a truth, a vitality that sings.