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One of Many Possible Art Issues

Cameron Platter

Cameron Platter lives in a small town just visible from Durban with his wife, his pug and his new born baby. It seems a peaceful existence, but meanwhile, in a secret laboratory deep beneath the surface, strange images are taking form.

La Kilimanjaro, oil on canvas

Cameron Platter lives in a small town just visible from Durban with his wife, his pug and his new born baby. It seems a peaceful existence, but meanwhile, in a secret laboratory deep beneath the surface, strange images are taking form. Full of bright colours and garish shapes, Cameron platter is the creator of films and drawings. Together they narrate a fictional and playful world, but with real world implications. It’s a world populated by KFC-muti messiahs, transvestite cats with eyes for world domination, hippie alien zebras and a crocodile P.I. maintaining order on the mean streets. Strip clubs, red latex boots and secret island hideouts policed by warthogs are recurring themes. It’s a world that is as bright, playful and terrifying as a trip during the Battle of Blood River.

This has the potential to be overexcited ADD art which plays right into the pop generation’s desire for instant gratification and random humour but something is withheld in Platters work; there is no climax. The films are slow, and repetitive, the characters recur psychotically all over the place, and the stories are less conclusive than the end of ‘Twelve Monkeys’.

The contrast between his almost child-like images and this sordid world which bears a passing resemblance to our own, makes me think of a kids picture of a house that burned down. The kid is not trying to sell, tell or conclude anything, but rather deal with the trauma and try to get over it.

CHAD ROSSOUW