Obituary

After pulling up my handbrake, I asked De Wet about his fascination with colour. Why? What is its yield? He looked at me through his Gene Hackman glasses. It is the material in its truest form, he said, passenger door ajar. It is paint as paint, nothing else. It just is. No complications. He slipped out my car, and was gone.

This does not stop me from longing to stare into the abyss, as Dante did and “see how all the pages of the Universe are bound by love, into a single volume.” Substance, accident and mode unite, he tells us – a serviceable definition of an artwork, surely, and one that holds out the promise of wholeness, while one gets out the paper and sharpens the pencils, and wait.

Criticism, be it fusty essaying of this sort, or the jazzy punditry of Facebook, is an accessory practice. It is saying, not doing. What distinguished Berger was his attempt to weld the two possibilities – saying and doing – together.