Jake Aikman | Blistering Barnacles

Surfaces and depths
By Sean O’Toole

For more than a decade now, Cape Town painter Jake Aikman has been producing works in a variety of styles and formats that depict the world’s seas, that vast liquid expanse covering more than two thirds of the earth. Rendered in exquisite gradations of green and blue, Aikman’s austere yet entrancing paintings typically show rippled bodies of water without a shoreline in the foreground or horizon. Despite the tenuous certainties that define our terrestrial understanding of the deep, that it will provide food and passage, constancy and tidal recurrence, the sea remains an ungovernable wild place.

A surfer since his teens, Aikman’s direct encounters with the sea, its varying moods and living creatures, have broadened his appreciation for the sea as an unpredictable marine geology and inhabited ecosystem. These experiences also modulated his academic research into repetition, appropriation, copying and the breakdown thereof in painting, research that saw him copy sea paintings by Gerhard Richter and Peter Doig in formative early works. It is no exaggeration to say that the actual and tangible sea always replenishes Aikman’s disciplined studio practice.

A 2013 surfing trip to Nicaragua and El Salvador, for instance, culminated in a breakthrough series showing densely thicketed coastal shorelines and volcanic clouds. Presented in his exhibition At the Quiet Limit, the littorals were noticeably unpeopled. Aikman’s early sea painting often referenced human subjects, but he came to regard the figure as a source of narrative distraction and identitarian complexities. His subsequent work completely abandoned human subjects. Forsaking people and littorals has enabled Aikman to concentrate on rendering – repeatedly, like the endless tidal movements recorded in his works – the mutable character of the sea.

Using a limited palette of French ultramarine, burnt sienna, sap green and very occasionally Prussian blue, Aikman’s output falls into two general categories. The first comprises flatly painted photorealist works depicting either tightly framed water bodies or marine horizons, sometimes with dense cloud formations. Thick impasto works abstractly depicting the sea now complements his loosely photorealist output. Rendered in familiar Aikman tones, the abstract works record ephemeral sensory experiences, of light and haze and the insubstantiality of vision, as well as register Aikman’s longstanding interest in painting as the subject of his work. This is important: his paintings are not simply or only about the sea.

A tireless experimenter, Aikman has iterated his work in various ways. In recent years he has increasingly allowed the colours of his underpainting – chiefly pink, red and yellow – to become visible in his compositions, whether mimetic or abstract. Aikman has also developed strategies that challenge the limitations of a single frame. An on-going series of hinged diptychs presented on plinths introduced a sculptural element into his practice. The binary format of these “book paintings” also gently echoes his earlier Janus series, large diptychs in which the adjoining seascapes mirror each other.

The Janus series, an example of which appears in his exhibition Blistering Barnacles, originated from a month-long stay at Lake Bracciano, a freshwater reservoir northwest of Rome, in 2014. Named after the Roman god of thresholds and transitions, Aikman recognised in this two-faced deity a duality that enabled him to think more expansively about the sea and its many possible meanings. Those meanings exceed the sea’s vast materialist reality. The author Jonathan Raban once described the sea as “the last great romantic wilderness on the planet.” Aikman’s paintings describe the visible surfaces of this vast wilderness, not its deep interior.

If there is a limitation in his point of view, in purposefully lingering at the edge of the deep, it needs to be said that this restraint is also logical: painting, after all, is about surfaces; depth is an illusion. Despite being mapped and surveilled by various technologies, despite its many utilities and on-going debasement as a resource, the sea resists domestication. The deep sea of Aikman’s work remains a place of projection, of mystery and myth, a place of abyssal depths of water. “The sea is so visible and yet so utterly invisible,” says Aikman, pointing to the gentle paradox that animates his mesmerising paintings of the sea.

Sean O’Toole is an art critic and writer living in Cape Town