​
THEORY AND PRACTICE
Lola Frost 2025
​
Like many artistic quests, mine started with my mother, who raged inarticulately against the patriarchal subordination of women, even as she assembled a wonderful collection of South African landscape and figurative artworks which shaped my intuitions about the life-affirming and power-deferring power of art. As an artist and senior lecturer at the Technikon Natal Fine Art Department in Durban South Africa in the 1990’s, these sensibilities were pummelled and expanded by feminist, postcolonial and critical theory insights and folded into the already rich and vibrant mix of what might be called resistance art practices, as South Africa transitioned to a proper democracy in 1994, and during which time my work was exhibited and collected in several public art collections. After 1995 I oscillated between living in South Africa and the UK. During this time my theory/practice PhD on the topic of Negativity in Painting (2001-2007) at Goldsmiths College, University of London, focussed on the differing methodological underpinnings of the aesthetic categories of the sublime and the poetic – a semantic project that continues to shape my claims about the life-affirming performativity of the work of art.
As the 2014/15 Leverhulme artist in residence and a Visiting Fellow in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London from 2014 to 2026, I have explored what is ethically, aesthetically and politically at stake in the practice of art. Art being framed here as a risky and pluralising locus between artists and audiences that resists, but which can also be co-opted to, power, for example, the securitising and strategic interests of war and conflict. Along these lines I have explored how art does its critical and constitutive work[1] beside and beyond the practice of rights by transforming and mediating those norms and hierarchies whose hidden articulations (in everyday practices and language, and rights abusing practices, for example) fuel gendered, class and racial violence and discrimination.
These theoretical efforts have been offset by the performative, pluralising and unrepresentable contours of my painting practice. Questions abound. How does one speak or write about the fullness of an unspeakable, form-folding, life-affirming, ecstatic, body/landscape painting practice that undoes and defers the power distributions of the phallogocentric order?
To answer those questions, in the 1990’s I turned to feminist theorists who critiqued the phallogocentric underpinnings of art history and philosophy. I was particularly taken by the ideas of Julia Kristeva who argued that the pulsing and performative negativities of the unconscious, maternity and the poetic are processual enactments that destabilise being and pulverise the power plays of the phallogocentric ‘symbolic’[2]. Judtih Butler explores the transformative potential of performative negativity for bodies caught up in the power constraints of phallocentric norms and practices[3]. I have explored how these psychic and social insights apply to the organising principles and aesthetic distributions of art. In so doing, I have been drawn to those philosophical insights that grapple with the relations between the power dynamics of our social world, encounter practices and phenomenal experience.
For example, Merleau-Pontian insights about the transformative, reversible and chiasmic performativity of painting and of corporeal-psychic life are particularly apt. Similarly, Charles Taylor’s search for human fullness in a secular age, which he argues is also located in transcendent poetic experience and linguistic creativity. I am also compelled by the aesthetic and social dynamics of what Elizabeth Grosz identifies as an ecstatic practice of ‘becoming undone’, whose politics and ethics bear some relation to
[1] Lola Frost. The Work of Art, Beside and Beyond Rights. The International Journal of Human Rights: Vol 28, No 8-9 and the IJHR list: Special issues from The International Journal of Human Rights
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13642987.2023.2259811
[2] Revolution in Poetic Language, Julia Kristeva. 1984.
[3] Bodies that Matter, Judith Butler. 1993.
Jean Luc Nancy’s[1] claims to the practice of ‘being-with’. All of which are figured as encounter practices that pluralise singularities and open life-worlds beyond power.
For me, the studio is the safe place in which such power-deferring, pluralising and aesthetically motivated encounter processes are coaxed into being. Here, collaged photographs of evocative landscape events prompt the spatial modelling of folding fractal forms where meaning slips between visual dissolution and psychically and phenomenally attuned gestures, to shape uncanny and visceral body-landscapes that pulse with an other-worlding energy. It is this chiasmic and generative visual grammar that undoes those mastering reflexes whose repressive apparatuses and discursive distributions control and shame the desires, vulnerabilities and energies of those individuals, women and men and persons of colour, who are ‘othered’ by it.
Jeremy Theophilus writes:
“To achieve this delicate balance of forces within each painting requires both focus and daring: the artist herself is placed amidst energies that compete for her attention. Her distinctive vocabulary is tested with each new canvas, each an experiment with the familiar, the zone of risk that is implicit in all creative practice.”
He goes on to quote Helene Cixous: Deluge 1992.
“It’s so dark here where I am searching for a language that makes no noise to whisper what is neither living nor dead. All words are too loud, too rapid, too sure, I’m searching for the names of the shadows between the words.”
My painting quest began as a melancholic and pulsing play of fractal forms beyond words. As the titles of my exhibitions in London and the UK over the last two decades attest: Pulse 2001, Coming Alive 2013, Taking Risks 2014, Going South 2015, A Dilating Gaze 2016, Living the Fold 2017 and Towards Deep and Radiant Time 2018, this painting practice makes its slow-burning, ecstatic and mesmerising way through vulnerability, rage and desire, towards the fullness of being-with one-another and the world, beyond power.
[1] Merleau-Ponty Reader, Interiority and Exteriority, Psychic Life and the World, eds. Dorothea Olkowski and James Morley,1999. Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections of Life, Politics and Art: Elizabeth Grosz, 2011. Being Singular Plural, Jean-Luc Nancy, 2000.
LIFE-FORCE
Reflections on the art of Lola Frost by Andries Gouws
A Delicate Balance – the paintings of Lola Frost
Jeremy Theophilus
September 2014
Impressed by the vastness of nature, I was trying to express its expansion, rest and unity. At the same time, I was fully aware that the visible expansion of nature is at the same time its limitation; vertical and horizontal lines are the expression of two opposing forces; these exist everywhere and dominate everything; their reciprocal action constitutes ‘life’. I recognised that the equilibrium of any particular aspect of nature rests on the equivalence of its opposites. I felt that the tragic is created by unequivalence. I saw the tragic in a wide horizon or a high cathedral.
How to pin down the moments of stasis in a world that is constantly shifting? How to hold together instants of matter moving in and against itself? How to find a structure that will allow for proportion, perspective and scale to be challenged on a flat plane without denying its inherent desire for movement?
Lola Frost’s paintings are not easy to be with: they draw you in to the detail of their parts whilst at the same time daring you to find a point of rest, a moment of calm. Identifying a place in them where one can assess measurement, or a relationship between inside and outside, is almost impossible. They are at one and the same time an environment that is both micro and macro: the viewer is constantly forced to flip the telescope from one end to the other.
In so doing they betray their origins: they do indeed reflect both landscape and the human form, but in a painted state where neither have been so intimately juxtaposed, nor made so disarmingly confrontational. How can a surface comprising many thousands of carefully layered brushstrokes oscillate with such illusory energy as to deceive the viewer into a state of real anxiety, followed closely by one of joyous relief?
The questions outnumber the answers, and this has to be a good sign for us, and the artist, in confronting such works. Art in all its manifestations is only really doing its stuff when it leaves us wanting to know more, wanting to understand how or why, even just wanting…. These works are very open questions that turn you back into the world with re-awakened senses. They can simultaneously reference deep-sea vents and the internal organs of the body, and in so doing articulate a relationship as well as questioning the borders between these apparently distant elements of our planet’s life.
There is a unity that underpins much of Lola Frost’s work: not just that of the repetitive brushstroke, but one that has its roots in traditional painting. The placement within the canvas, its preparation, the juxtaposition of fiery and fluid form with a neutral, anonymous background: what world do these images inhabit when turned to the studio wall, if not one with which Florentine and Venetian artists would themselves have been familiar? Something too about the colour and tonal ranges this artist employs acknowledges such classical antecedents.
And yet, Lola Frost is an artist working in the 21st century, for whom contemporary issues of gender, ethics and the sublime are all urgent and meaningful, and have their place within these images. Their awe-full pose, their looming immanence, their familiar corporeal references: these all speak to us clearly in a world that is increasingly unsettled, unnatural and unhappy. As quoted above, Mondrian sought to find both a working process and a philosophy that would address and unite the world he contemplated. His solution was a paring down to the very roots of visual perception; but I would argue there is a shared rigour within the works in this exhibition.
Again and again, in looking at these paintings one comes back to the spaces between edges, indeed between skins of various textures. There is an endless Mobian membrane that encloses the articulated surfaces, and there is the background skin, often more like a curtain. Whether it is just that, or the finality of the picture plane, it is never an infinity, much more a further enclosure.
A sensual claustrophobia haunts some of these works, especially when the torso/head/figure excludes all but a glimpse of the background. As a viewer one is often at eye level with the intensity of motion within the form: there is no space to turn away. This is further emphasised by the very controlled colour range: one that is part anatomical textbook, part topographical print. Combined, they accentuate the push and pull of the images, forming a counterpoint to the invitation of the familiar.
To achieve this delicate balance of forces within each painting requires both focus and daring: the artist herself is placed amidst energies that compete for her attention. Her distinctive vocabulary is tested with each new canvas, each an experiment with the familiar, the zone of risk that is implicit in all creative practice.
It’s so dark here where I am searching for a language that makes no noise to whisper what is neither living nor dead. All words are too loud, too rapid, too sure, I’m searching for the names of the shadows between the words.