July, 2001 For the past twelve years the South African artist William Kentridge has been making short, unscripted "drawings for projection." They are film animations of ten minutes or less, each based on about ten of his charcoal drawings. These projections entirely reinvent the seamless, slick animation genre and bring it into a realm that has nothing to do with Disney Studio's productions. A projection literally refers to what the camera unfolds in a dark room. But projection also suggests what is born from our memory and emotional make-up as well as from our desire to escape memory's impasses and leap into the future. In Kentridge's projections not only do the rough, vivid black-and-white drawings "move" in movie-time as his epigraphic stories unfold, but the body language of the main characters- Soho and Felix, alternately perpetrator and victim - is born from and reflects the drawings-in-progress. One sees the charcoal erasures as marking their evolution; a layer of past and a thread of present are always intermingled. Similarly in South Africa as in other regions of unrest, the unnamable and the repressed cannot be erased: they keep surging to the surface. In South Africa the surging was quite literal when in 1998-99 the bodies of apartheid's victims, whose killing had been sanctioned by the state, were exhumed as testimonies in the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Kentridge's works are politically inclined: each angrily scratched line is steeped in the history of a place he knows intimately. The 45-year-old artist has lived all his life in Johannesburg, developing his technique over the course of apartheid's collapse and the establishment of a democracy. But these are no political cartoons. As in Grosz's drawings of the Weimar Republic, it is their anger, ambiguity and ironic density that lends them emotional weight and will draw in even the most blasé of viewers. Kentridge's raw expressionist drawing and etching techniques may not be at the level of an Egon Schiele or a Lucian Freud but his vivid poet's imagination, his movies, metamorphoses and metaphors make this retrospective truly unforgettable. Carole Naggar William Kentridge's work is on view until September 16. It is his first New York showing since a MOMA exhibition in 1998. The New Museum of Contemporary Art 583 Broadway New York, NY 10012 212.219.1222 www.new museum.org