CAMERON PLATTER

Cameron Platter is a stylist of attitude. His work is at once irreverent, witty, sharp and more than a tri­fle nostalgic. The nostalgia he keeps at bay through an almost unrelenting focus on living the good life: what could be characterised in his terms as "fast cars, fast women, cocktails and cronies". Platter's work has always been concerned with appropriation but it is the manner in which he has begun to appropriate himself that shows real development in his practice.

As a student at the Michaelis School of Fine Art he confounded his lecturers by presenting works which, in essence, were exact facsimiles of pieces by Yinka Shonibare and Marlene Dumas. This soon developed into more subtle forms of appropriation, culminating in the masterful turn of self-appropria­tion to be seen in his latest works.

Trained as a painter, Platter uses various media including videography, pencil crayon drawing, direct painting onto the surface of the gallery wall and printmaking within his body of work. A favourite technique of his is to take a fairly simple but elegant drawing, latterly produced through a simple computer imaging program, and to blow it up to monumental scale, reproducing it with obses­sive accuracy on vast sheets of Fabriano paper using thick layers of crayon.

Platter's iconographic universe is closely related to a quasi-cartoon world in which crocodiles sporting pinkie rings and driving red sports cars while sipping on martinis co-exist with zebras from outer space who hover over the earth's landscape zapping wrong-doers. Platter translates his zany, funny and essentially delightful visions into drawings and "illustrates" these drawings with narrative cartoonesque videos. His show The Love is Approaching (referencing text from a John Muafangejo print which reads "the love is approaching but too much of anything is very dangerous") saw five such video works (Platter called them Five Easy Pieces, possibly a witty reference to the unnecessari­ly convoluted and difficult way through which the seemingly "simple" final product is realised) mirror­ing five large-scale drawings. Significantly the title work of the exhibition appropriated a self-portrait by Muafangejo. Its "illustration" in video form presented Platter's rendition of the Namibian printmaker in conversation with a sinister Ernst Stavro Blofeld of James Bond infamy. The interview thus seems to reference another Muafangejo work, where he is dwarfed by academics at the University of Cape Town in an interview situation, a telling analogy in the context of Platter's lukewarm reception at that institution, his alma mater.

Platter's work extends beyond the confines of formal practice. Like so many of his contempo­raries, he uses the media, his lifestyle and the context of the art world as part of his process of pro­duction. Along with his close friend and occasional collaborator, Vuyisa Nyamende, he was instrumen­tal in developing the phenomenon of "Flash". Essentially this manifested in the construction and pro­duction of attention-grabbing stunts that highlighted their work. By incorporating some elements of "Flash" with an embracing of a seemingly hedonistic lifestyle (but it could be argued that this sup­posed lifestyle was merely a "Flash" projection of an idealised and wished-for world) Platter has become firmly associated with Galena Puta. This non-venue-specific, "conceptual" gallery, named the Spanish word for prostitute, is a collaboration with myself and fellow artist Ed Young. Puta has provided Platter with a broad framework to develop works that engage directly with the central issues of contemporary art production while maintaining his deeply irreverent and wonderfully humorous approach to life and art making.

That Platter likes to lull the viewer into reading his work as easy, light, or simple, belies the deer seriousness of purpose and seemingly contradictory obsessively hard-working work ethic of the artist.

Andrew Lamprecht

Extract from: Lamprecht, Andrew, Perryer, Sophie, ed. “Cameron Platter.” 10 Years, 100 Artists: Art in a Democratic South Africa, Cape Town, Struik Publishers, 2004,Page 48