If walls could talk

You'd think fixing cars and making art couldn't be more different, but some of the things that happen in a panel beater's shop aren't dissimilar to those occurring in an artist’s studio. Achieving the perfect tone or shade of paint can hold great significance in both, for example, and their interiors are typically paint-splattered. Incredible transformations also take place in these locations; damaged cars leave looking fresh off an assembly line, blank canvases become portals into an artist’s imagination or shed light on society's woes.

Drawing comparisons between artists and panel beaters is the consequence of a novel exhibition at Cape Town's Southern Guild gallery, presented by Iranian-born Kamyar Bineshtarigh. Stealing its title from the address of a panel shop near his Salt River studio, 9 Hopkins  centres on the artist extracting the incidental marks from its interior walls. 

Indeed, in many cities, artists' studios sit cheek-by-jowl with panel beaters. Think of those in Maboneng and Doornfontein in Joburg. Bineshtarigh is not the first artist to draw inspiration from his neighbour — Rosie Mudge, Frances Goodman and Liberty Battson have exploited automotive paint and parts in their art. Battson seriously leant into automotive production, generating hanging works that exuded the gloss of newly minted vehicles.   

But Bineshtarigh  isn't interested in the sheen of the new — his aesthetic stands in stark contrast to newness. His “canvases” are oversized, misshapen and have raw, uneven edges — they've been peeled off in large chunks from walls or derived from them. The surfaces are textured, beaten, marked and worn; they're fragments of lived experience, presenting the residue of activities that have taken place inside the titular 9 Hopkins.  

Naturally, Bineshtarigh adds artistic flourishes, which manifest in black marks that follow random patterns of movement, like dirty feet across a white floor. The degree to which this occurs varies. In a trio of works titled Panel Beaters Wall, there's less artistic adornment; black smudges creep up the bottom of the surface, suggesting accumulated dirt from the floor has permeated the walls. In other works, like the large-scale Studio Wall XII, Bineshtarigh's mark-making is frenetic and conceals the more subtle “layers of history”, teasing out imagined traces of time.    

The results are abstract works in a subdued pallet that belie a gritty realism. The one should cancel the other out; an abstract mode typically evades realism or captures the ordinary. This proves useful, allowing for a gap or space between history and imagination, art and life in the same way an artist's studio is situated next door to a panel beater.  

Bineshtarigh’s artistic practice is made unique by his process and materials. His studio walls are his canvas. Ordinarily, walls don't capture the imagination of artists, but those in his studio, which once housed a garment factory, piqued an interest in the traces of its previous incarnation and the labour that took place in this area of Cape Town, once a hub of industry — the garment manufacturing district. This resulted in a body of works at a previous exhibition, Uncover, which showed at Cape Town's Norval Foundation in 2022 and in which he peeled off the surface (via a cold-glue process) of his studio walls, lifting the marks left by his art-making and those of the people who occupied the former clothing factory. He harnessed an accumulation of accidental marks, forming a sort of archive or record of time and movement, and the phases and history of a space.  

The awareness of the history of these evacuated industrial buildings in Salt River and nearby Woodstock are linked to the gentrification cycle that's taken hold in parts of these suburbs. This has, like elsewhere, involved property developers repackaging old factory spaces into desirable lofts or other lifestyle-related businesses.  

Interestingly, some of the stylistic trends associated with gentrification involve embracing the origin of the space. Exposed pipes and worn concrete floors define this “inner-city loft look” and are venerated by the young, middle-class people who move in yearning to escape suburbia and evince a hankering for “authentic” urban aesthetics.  

Bineshtarigh's art doesn’t address the sociopolitical politics of gentrification directly. He doesn't appear to be motivated by landmark events, but the accumulation of ordinary activities over time — a delicate process of sifting through the marks left behind, selecting which ones to bring to the surface. In this exhibition, he mimics the traces of “work” or layers them with his own “work” as an artist.   

Ultimately, it's the scale of his artworks and the novelty of his medium that's captivating. His approach is conceptually fresh too, particularly in a country where artists have been grappling with ways to engage with hidden histories and unknown archives. 

9 Hopkins  runs until October 19.