JANICE RABIE

Janice Rabie is a South African artist who lives and works in Cape Town. She is a graduate of the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town.

Painting is an obsessional practice. Each painting is a puzzle to be solved, a series of conundrums to be resolved. It can take weeks, months, even years.

Painting uses matter, the material, to transcend materiality, to bring out the spirituality in our physical existence. It is a visual language that can speak of the universal.

Buildings and mountains. Symbolic of opposing principles. Opposites define one another and bring one another into existence (Heraclitus). There is an inner striving to unify, reconcile the opposites, bring them to rest.

“World and earth are essentially different from one another and yet are never separated.  The world grounds itself on the earth, and earth juts through world.  Yet the relation between world and earth does not wither away into the empty unity of opposites unconcerned with one another.  The world, in resting upon the earth, strives to surmount it.  As self-opening it cannot endure anything closed.  The earth, however, as sheltering and concealing, tends always to draw the world into itself and keep it there.”

Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art