Masks
Peaceful, harmonious color abstractions activated with dynamic elements of simple forms describe facets of the work. The sculptures give one the impression of being freely formed and pressed into shape very much as children would handle plasticine without the formal considerations for metal structures upon which clay is usually applied
© Jean-Claude Desroussaux | Text by Lorraine Clements, Pretoria News 1982
Heads
Does something fade out or clear up?
Are they faces in the making? Faces at rest? In folds of unrest?
Is it the faces, the familiar faces of loss?
© Jean-Claude Desroussaux | Text by Alain Delmotte
Faceless
There are no concessions to conventional beauty in the faceless heads of Herman Van Nazareth
© Jean-Claude Desroussaux | Text by Rand Daily Mail, 6th May 1969
Shapes
Van Nazareth’s work is unique. Is is intensely personal – emotional and haunted with a strong sense of purely visual, painterly values, often combined with a satirical, savage social awareness
© Jean-Claude Desroussaux | Text by ‘The Cape Argus’ 1968, Owen Williams
Sculptures
What I admire in this artist is his gnarled doggedness, his ferocity, his headstrong stubbornness. Also, his creative perseverance, his muscled and at certain moments cursing expression with which he attacks his material tirelessly, with unadulterated dynamism. Inflexible and bunted: that is the nature of his artistic engagement. Art must be for Herman Van Nazareth a kind of innate fever
© Jean-Claude Desroussaux | Text by Alain Delmotte
Portraits
The obsessive search I encounter when contemplating these paintings is, in the light of my interpretation, not only a search after the other but as well a search after the other in ourselves, after those factors that make us another too – in the eyes of the other
© Jean-Claude Desroussaux | Text by Alain Delmotte
Nude
As a spectator, we can only test our world of thought and feeling against the world of thought and feeling of Van Nazareth: in search of cross-sections, in search of differences.
© Jean-Claude Desroussaux | Text by Alain Delmotte
Statues
The artist evokes something that comes from very far. From the far region that is close to us: our own spiritual world. In all those paintings and sculptures – all those heads in the paintings, all those standing figures in the sculptures – we should recognize ourselves first. We are those heads, we are those figures – the heads and figures we are blind to – they frighten us, they disturb our night sleep: they expose blatant human existence. I must come back on this later
© Jean-Claude Desroussaux | Text by Alain Delmotte