John Banting (1902-1972)

Still Life with Leaf shows how organicity and vegetable growth are central to the suspension of geometrical shapes, echoing the balance which the mind attempts to create in ones relationships with reality. The energy, inseparable from the work, testifies to the energy of creation in the painter, himself the seat of the tension between growth and flight on the one hand and stability and fixity on the other.
These three works (see also lots 17 and 20) by Banting summarise his own obsession between life and death, movement and immobility, the rational and the irrational, what man wants to master and what proves to be unmasterable.

M.R.