The Diversity Triptych ,1994
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Literature : Geers, K. (1997). Contemporary South African Art: The Gencor Collection. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers, colour illustration on p.59.
Notes : In 1990, in Troyeville, Johannesburg, while staring from his kitchen window at an ‘ugly’ brick wall, Simon Stone first took inspiration to work in mosaic. Finding many of the public art murals at the time ‘quite uninspiring’, Stone started producing mosaics mainly as public and private commissions. One of his first was for fashion designer Marianne Fassler and later for artist William Kentridge. Today, Stone’s public mosaics include a mural in the foyer of the SABC head offices, the entrance to the office of a mining conglomerate, the fountain in the Hyde Park Corner shopping centre and the obelisk at the Illovo Boulevard.The Diversity Triptych is an impressive large-scale work, made between 1994 and 1995 for a site-specific commission. This is the only free-standing mosaic that Stone ever produced. In a composition which references the religious altarpieces of 13th century Europe, he divided the pictorial narrative into three parts, like a three-act play. Each panel is a unique and captivating allegory. Herein lies the magic of this work – like Stone’s paintings, it charms the viewer into attempting to decode the artist’s iconographical repertoire. Stone asserts that the layout and planning of his mosaics in general are ‘design-orientated’ and the practical process ‘very logical’, yet his conceptual approach in creating split-screen scenes and collage-like compositions of different objects in puzzling juxtapositions is evident in The Diversity Triptych. The work shows the hand of a technical master, each individual tessera perfectly shaped and placed in an immaculate arrangement on the picture plane. The right-hand panel introduces the first act of The Diversity Triptych drama. The scene is set in downtown Johannesburg. Act two is a pin-board composition of various elements arranged on a flat multi-coloured plane that immediately presents the theme; the nine-to-five working life inside the walls of the city buildings. The third and final act is an imaginative place of quiet contemplation. The main character is ‘a Greek philosopher of sort’, leaning through a windowed arch and holding a book of knowledge. Stone concludes that ‘this is where one goes to get away, away from the office – out of the city, to go somewhere to escape, maybe to find yourself’.
Marelize van Zyl
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