Arlene Amaler-Raviv’s self-portrait, her favourite self-portrait, hangs in the place of honour: the bimah at the old synagogue in the South African Jewish Museum, where her current exhibition – The Voice of a Citizen – is on display. It is surrounded by a group of other works that are sacred to her (we’ll get to those later) but she explains that this one is her most personal work, and coincidentally also the most recent – it is still wet; she hung it up right before the exhibition opened. It’s tiny. It shows a woman standing upright with her hands in a gesture of supplication. Over her is written: “More than the calf needs to suckle, the cow needs to give.”

Once you have viewed the exhibition from start to finish, that one small portrait ties the rest of the works together. In describing the exhibition, Gabriella Kaplan quotes one of Amaler-Raviv’s influences, filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky: “Art is a meta-language, with the help of which people try to communicate with one another; to impart information about themselves and assimilate the experience of others. Again, this has not to do with practical advantage but with realising the idea of love, the meaning of which is in sacrifice: the very antithesis of pragmatism.

‘The Man with the Briefest Case’, Amaler-Raviv’s portrait of Pope Benedict XVI

“I simply cannot believe that an artist can ever work only for the sake of ‘self-expression’. Self-expression is meaningless unless it meets with a response. For the sake of creating a spiritual bond with others it can only be an agonising process, one that involves no practical gain: ultimately it is an act of sacrifice. But surely it cannot be worth the effort merely for the sake of hearing one’s own echo?”

I would put the same message more simply. What strikes one most of all in Amaler-Raviv’s work is an overwhelming sense of empathy. She paints with a terrible tenderness that leaves one disturbed and unable to take in very much else for some hours afterwards.

It takes particular talent to combine such a humane and compassionate outlook with such a savage capacity for political critique, but that’s precisely what Amaler-Raviv has done, over and over again. Don’t be fooled by the tremendous gentleness with which she renders individual subjects; the unspoken target is their context.

Amaler-Raviv has been working for four decades and has exhibited both locally and internationally. Some readers may remember her for her installation Dislocation Relocation, which was exhibited in District Six (see video below). Amaler-Raviv visited District Six and collected original vinyl and linoleum from vacated houses, on which she painted the faces of 299 people who had been relocated under Apartheid. She shaped these into tiles and created a walkway on Hanover Street – which retains its original name – placing this under reinforced glass. Alongside, she lined it with 299 telephone directories representing the locations, names and details of the relocated families.

Watch:  The making of Dislocation Relocation

Today, most of the portraits that survived have been sold. Only a few weathered telephone directories and linoleum tiles remain. It is these that are displayed in the old bimah, also intended as a sign of respect.

When one enters the exhibition, the first thing one sees is a series of glass panes filled with postcards. These postcards, Amaler-Raviv tells Daily Maverick, are intended to one day form a book, and should be read like a book. Many viewers walk past them too quickly, which is a pity. They represent decades of her work and life – and the lives of others around her. One walking man appears over and over during the exhibition; it turns out he was a man who walked past her studio every day carrying a garbage bag on his head. It bothered her that she didn’t know who he was; in the drawings, he was anonymous – a dark figure passing by. Notes on the back of a postcard read: “Saw him again today. And again. And again …” One day, she drew his face. On that postcard, the dark figure fades far into the background.

On the next level, a giant screw bears down on the body of a tiny woman. Both her Hands Full is the title of the work. It appears the woman is being hammered down, ground into the earth; an indelibly powerful image. Asked about it, Amaler-Raviv talks about a young man she knew who was working in the city to support his family. He was worried about his mother, left far away to build her house by herself, with her bare hands. There was no father.

Watch: The exhibition opening

Another massive work is a giant display of framed pages from an early edition of the Hamlyn Children’s History of the World. For some reason, someone gave this to Amaler-Raviv. Thumbing through it, she noticed that there was only one page – half a page, actually – dedicated to the entire African continent. At the time, she was fighting depression and was unable to work. Day after day she drew, painted and doodled over the pages of the book, sometimes in rebellion, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes with a deliberate comment. Once she had covered all the pages and was packing up her home, she prepared to throw the book out. But her daughter saw the drawings and thought otherwise. “There’s a whole exhibition here,” she said. And so it is now on display.

Some of the work is subtle (a tiny figure standing alone in a museum, titled only Me); some of it is immensely powerful (a massive, dark, anonymous figure titled Native); some of it is joyful (a working man blown up to immense size, walking confidently through the streets of Johannesburg); some of it is funny (a line sketch hanging over a mirror, entitled I work with paint, I am now very tired.)

What is beautiful about this exhibition is how effortless and unselfconscious its compassion appears. Amaler-Raviv herself is friendly, unpretentious. Asked what she wants to do next, she says she’s going to pack up the exhibition and put it in storage. She doesn’t want to look at a paintbrush; she’s a grandmother of three and wants to enjoy that for a while. She doesn’t go in for grandiose descriptions. She thanks you profusely for being interested. When talking about her work, she doesn’t talk about herself, the artistic process or even the end result. She talks about the subjects that captured her attention or moved her. The focus is outside. She’s more interested in listening and looking than talking.

Photos: Amaler-Raviv in Cape Town.

Kaplan puts it more lyrically: “Amaler-Raviv’s focus … has grown in ever-expanding concentric circles, rippling outwards from herself towards individuals, family, friends, community, society; all citizens,” she writes. “The overall transition from the personal to the public, to the global and the universal and back again, happened incrementally. Each expansion corresponding to a growing consciousness of our existence in the world and coinciding with major political shifts; the end of Apartheid being the most influential.”

Amaler-Raviv tells Daily Maverick she loves the way Kaplan described her work; that it was perfectly understood. But even so, I’m going a different route – writing less, and keeping it straightforward. This is not in disagreement with Kaplan, but rather to add a different dimension. Amaler-Raviv is so down-to-earth, and so accessible, that it would do her a disservice not to let that shine through. Her work is deeply conscious and brilliantly executed. But ultimately all that needs to be said is written on that one portrait at the entrance. At the core, she wants to give, and give she has. DM