| It is fitting that Patrick Mautloa should admire fellow painter Robert Hodgins's 'extraordinary feeling for colour' and 'spontaneity'. 'He makes a mark in the right place and it's just enough,' says Mautloa; 'so fresh, you say, how could he have thought of such a shape? It's so fluid.' Mautloa's own work reveals an equally light, yet acute and intense preoccupation with positioning, size and colour. 'At times I feel that a work which is totally complete gets to be somehow saturated, too neat, too well executed. It gets to be boring,' he says. 'There's got to be a little gap between the finished piece and getting there. When somebody looks at the work they've got to play around with that little gap.' For Mautloa, there are no words to define the interplay between the unpredicted and the resolved. Asked if he knows when to stop, he laughs. 'I don't,' he says. 'Sometimes I end up changing the whole colour scheme of a painting.'
As with most artists whose work seems abstract at first glance, Mautloa's paintings in fact reflect the images he sees in his daily life. A brazier belching smoke will be observed, photographed, and reappear repeatedly in paintings in which glowing lozenge-like shapes recall holes in the brazier. It is not only the form of the brazier which catches the attention of Mautloa, the rusty iron with its fiery peepholes, and the soft grey cloud above it. It is what it represents in the life of the townships - an instant fire, a point of warmth where passersby can gather for a moment to talk and laugh. 'I see that brazier as a metaphor.' says Mautloa.
Although Mautloa's work is about the life around him, he points out that it is never reducible to the time in which it was made. 'You can fill tip lots of canvases with what is happening now. If you do some work and it stays within a certain period, it gets old with the time. But if you let it be open, it goes on and on and on ... ' For Mautloa, the drama of looking, of engaging with the work over what can be a long period of time, is essential. 'Sometimes you stand close to a work and you see nothing. If you get back you see more. That's the type of thing I enjoy. A work should relax one, let the mind wander. You sit there, you feel you can breathe what comes out of there.' A work exists beyond the materials that compose it. Speaking of a sliver of blue at the top of a canvas, Mautloa asks. 'But if I was to get beyond that sky and see what's there, is it fresher? ... nicer? ... because I know what's here.'
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