Cape Town

STEVENSON is pleased to present Fever Dream, a solo exhibition by Deborah Poynton.

This body of work comprises oil paintings on canvas and board, as well as drawings on black paper. Chiefly created over the last two years, the detailed scenes in Fever Dream span lushly atmospheric renderings of the natural environment to existential portrayals of her sitters adrift in a void. Where Poynton’s recent exhibitions have discussed empathy, mortality and vulnerability, Fever Dream engages concepts such as time, control, innocence as well as her abiding concern - painting itself. The artist writes:

In a painting things just are, with the inevitable feeling of dreams.

The exquisite textures of life are embedded in these soft spaces with hallucinatory realness. Behind the closed eyelid of the canvas, my imagination can run free.

As in a dream, a painting has its own internal logic. Time is subjective, meaning is open to interpretation and pain mingles with joy.

Perhaps my anxious striving can be eased as I gaze into this otherworldly stillness. Perhaps at last I can relinquish control and let myself feel.

For me, these visions are a consoling reflection of how life really is: a tempting mirage, an enchantment, a waking dream.

In Fever Dream, Poynton offers a distinctly nocturnal tableau; a deer walks through a thicket of party lights, a pillow floats towards the stars and the moon bears witness to a housing complex. The artist’s characteristic realism is counterbalanced with invention and sleights of perspective, continuing her sustained examination of perception and comprehension. ‘A painting is a kind of spell’, Poynton writes.

The works in this exhibition are accompanied by artist texts, offering a glimpse into the thinking behind individual works, while contextualising Poynton’s broader influences, from Dutch 17th century still lifes to 18th century English poetry. For a drawing titled Apparition, yet resonant throughout Fever Dream, she writes:

Perhaps when the line between dreams and reality vanishes, we see things as they really are. The fragile structures of meaning are swept away. In that liminal moment we realise that the waking mind is just a trick. Once the terror has passed, there is nothing but freedom left.

This will be her 15th solo exhibition with the gallery, following A Thin Veil in Amsterdam in 2024 and Vertigo in Cape Town in 2023.

The exhibition opens Saturday 29 March, 10am to 1pm. Poynton will give a walkabout on the day of the opening at 11am.