Detail

• Artist: Francois Smit
• Published in: The Sunday Independent
• Author of article: Maureen Isaacson
• Date: 17/02/2007

• Paper: 280gsm 100% cotton acid free paper
• Ink: Epson ultrachrome archival pigment ink
• Image Size (printarea): 594mm x 420mm
• Frame: Optional
• Edition: Limited edition of 12

A short extract from the article

Maureen Isaacson skips the drag and engages the artist about matters deep, dark and personal.

I have come to Mellville, in Johannesburg, to meet Pieter-Dirk Uys. I'm looking for the man behind the mask - the man behind the wigs, the moustaches and scarves, the man who makes us laugh at our own follies, our bigotry.
I want to know what switches on the light, what flips the switch. Who is he, this man who brings down the house? Clearly, he is no "house clown", as Essop Pahad, the minister in the presidency, has claimed. And, certainly, he is not just a cock in a frock, desperate to drag, andhe is not a bloodthirsty throat cutter.
But in Pieter-Dirk: Eish! - Uys's show that opened at Johannesburg's Market Theatre this week - no cows are too sacred to slaughter, no fear too strong to face.
Fear has always been his target, Uys says. And it works. Uys's painting of our grossness in broad brush strokes brings the truths home.
In Eish!, Adrian Vlok, in a janitor's guise, washes the feet of a large black man in the audience, and Mother Teresa answers the phone in Heaven. "God's out," she says, and warns suicide bombers that they will arrive in 27 pieces, one for each of the promised virgins.
With stunning versatility, Uys switches character, acting out the equivalent of the cartoonist's caricature. Now he is Aziz Pahad, the deputy foreign minister who justifies South Africa's vote to block a UN security council resolution calling for an end to human rights abuses in Myanmar. Now he is Mrs Patel, recently returned from London and who, unwittingly, becomes involved in stealing a vehicle belonging to two Nigerian nationals.

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