Understanding Enigmas of Identity

Considered one of South Africa’s most talented artists, Lionel Smit is best known for his contemporary portraiture executed through monumental canvases and sculptures.

Exposed to sculpture at a young age through his father, the renowned sculptor Anton Smit, he progressed to painting during a restless process to find an artistic personality to articulate the inherent enigmas he perceives within the human face.

This quest has led to him creating an astonishing body of work that offers an entry point into the variety and richness that lies beneath the faces we encounter in life, whether articulated in bronze or through paint.

Smit's process as an artist continues to be adaptive, inventive, and physically engaging.

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Lionel Smit tours his studio

He paints abstract canvases of lines and swathes of colour, then lets them sit around the studio, ideas gestating, until he’s ready to project photographs of the model on them - an overlaid image of a face or bust – in most cases posed by anonymous models from the Cape Malay community.

He relies on his painting technique to transcribe form, frequently reworking images multiple times so that colours and lines merge, breaking down both.

The people he paints or sculpts possess a particular quality that appeals to visual sensitivity - the sitter’s face quite simply acting as a vessel for this experimentation with colour, stroke and technique.

He accentuates facial characteristics through different colours and brush techniques, creating works that captivate and draw viewers in closer to examine details on the faces.

While retaining all their austerity and peaceful aesthetic, Smit’s figures are highly charged with the emotive and gestural energy of his creative process.

And his treatment of bronze as a medium reveals it to be especially well suited to the translation of his painterly activities into sculpture.

His bronzes are created using the lost wax casting method – one of the oldest known metal-forming techniques. 

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A close-up of a green bronze patina

Patinas commonly available to artists working in bronze include natural browns, blacks and greens. But with the importance of colour to Smit in his painting, he uses alternative methods that result in a unique fusion of intensely saturated patinas onto the bronze.

Brilliant streaks of blues and greens enrich the grooves of an ear, while the natural shadow of an eyelid is intensified by the deepening of rich black patina.

With this ability to manipulate the patination process and an enthusiasm for surface gradations, this avant-garde approach to bronze has allowed him to consistently push the artistic envelope.

Smit has established a substantial international following and achieved success all over the world, including sell-out exhibitions in London and Hong Kong, and his work continues to inspire and captivate the minds of art novices and experts alike.

For more take a look at: lionelsmit.co.za