Taking care

The Brandberg is a maze with no beaten paths. All traces are immediately effaced as the hiker leaves the dumbfounded rocks behind. Here silence is grandiose and is truly ‘deafening’, as they say. Only a scurrying hyrax, or a bounding klipspringer betrays the disorder momentarily triggered by our arrival, but their appearance is sometimes so fleeting that the sight of them is almost an illusion. Similarly, the paintings have always pleased me in the way they give of themselves completely yet with endless reserve, like the stillness of a lake beneath which pass vague shadows of large fish that never disrupt the surface. Nakedness is within, says writer Belinda Cannone. And yet it shows. Such is the strange truth always conveyed by appearances; it is striking that, at such an early date, humans sought this truth in the bodies of animals, who are never naked but whose skin, whether covered in fur or not, whether patterned or not, always – in our eyes – clothes them. I thus recall a painting of a female hartebeest in all the majesty of her animal flesh, adorning the base of a rock in Weyersbrunne Gorge in the Brandberg. The site itself is remarkable: a huge granite slope on the edge of a plateau. But at the foot of the wall, space is too restricted for a large gathering or a long stay. Even more fascinating is the painting there, contained in a place chosen for its desolation. Here it is: a female hartebeest, perhaps pregnant and about to give birth, surrounded by nine little human figures. The animal has halted but is heading towards the natural gap where the rock wall recedes. Privacy conducive to giving birth and supernatural otherworldliness are combined here in a picture of regenerative life, having skilfully exploited a rockface that curves into a fold. The figures, arms raised, have the co-ordinated gestures that indicate a ceremonial, ritualized activity but this meeting is more symbolic than real: it expresses a desired – and in fact profoundly authentic – intimacy, not an encounter that ever took place. For that matter, this archaic motif surfaces in artistic traditions far removed from one another and entertains unsettling comparisons with engravings in the Saharan Atlas at Fezzan and the desert of Nubia.