Whenever I visit Louis Schachat's gallery, Die Kunskamer, I pore over the collages of Cynthia Villet. Over the years my admiration has accrued, and her work now arouses the same wonder and awe I experienced whilst communing with the Kandinskys, Malevichs and Mondrians at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. These high priests of abstraction believed their new idiom could parley with the Gods. Villet inherited their faith, and became the vestal of this sacred flame. Her every painting is a passionate affirmation of transcendence, a reverberating 'Hosanna!' insisting that there must indeed be a something above and beyond. We feel the presence of this supreme force. It is there in her colour, there in her line. But as the appearance of the Godhead is an enigma, the artist must perforce proceed by hints, ellipsis and indirection. Villet's obliquities invoke the grand mysteries of being, and echo that primal howl of entreaty that God should manifest Himself to man that the human race has bawled into the void since time began.

Poetic spirit

This mystic art elicited fervent admiration amongst the visual intelligentsia of New York during the 70's and 80's, when Villet was acclaimed as "one of the foremost artists of our time, a brilliantly creative, poetic spirit in the tradition of Paul Klee, Ben Nicholson and Jules Bissier" by Doctor Roger Lipsey, a distinguished academic from Berkeley and Princeton. M.O.M.A., the Museum of Modern Art of Latin America in Washington and the Baltimore Museum of Art all eagerly acquired Villet's work. The artist had regular solos in South Africa, Israel and at the Kouros gallery in New York, where she also participated in group shows, hanging alongside Picasso, Dali, Miro and Ernst.

At the time Villet and her husband, the architect Kenneth Gardner, lived in Barbados. The West Indies was, and is, the modish resort of affluent sophisticates, and there the artist captured international attention and became a feted celebrity. This charmed life came to an abrupt end in the early 90's when Villet lost her husband, son and daughter in rapid succession. These devastating blows drove her back to her birthplace and family in Cape Town.

Although the fragile artist continued to work, she ceased exhibiting abroad. Her husband had always taken charge of the practical aspects of her career, and without his support, she felt unequal to the strains of promoting herself on the international circuit.
Villet is known for her reclusive temperament and fastidious recoil from the grubby, self-advertising machinations of the art world.

Miraculously well preserved and elegantly presented, she is a slender, willowy creature, soft of speech and gentle of manner. All is not suave pliancy however. Something farouche appears in the way she peeps shyly at you through her long blond fringe. There is a touch of the fey, a hint of the sprite, a dash of something truant and wild. I told her how passionately I admired her work, and she invited me to her home. This is a displaced Mediterranean villa - all windows, air, whiteness and light - built by Adele Naude dos Santos for her crippled father. Such seclusion provides the ideal habitat for Villet, an intensely private person devoted to solitude and an art of soaring spirituality.

Abstract canvases

Her home is a proclamation of affinities. The cool, spacious interiors are punctuated with crisp abstract canvases by Ben Nicholson and Yaacov Agam. Such art tallies with Villet's habits of mind, and reflects her instinct for order, interval, balance and harmony. Here she pursues the disciplines of art making and meditation. Her nearest and dearest are dead, and age has accelerated the process of shedding and renunciation. Her uncluttered life and focused energies suffuse her oeuvre with poise and clarity, transmuting illness and grief into a luminous effervescence.

Female nude

The Angel of Death, a ripe, magnificently endowed female nude, her head and shoulders cloaked beneath a black shroud, erupts into the living room from a Portway oil executed immediately before his demise. This figurative work is an anomaly in the artist's canon, and hence, a rare collector's piece. Villet's connoisseurial eye also reveals itself in prodigal bibelots. Shelves and table tops carry myriad diminutive treasures, archaeological fragments on tiny plinths, congeries of Chinese glass snuff bottles, oriental ivories, jade and netsuke, here a Russian icon, there a Jeff Koons sculpture, a Haitian voodoo cushion, a Gerrit Rietveld chair?

"What we glimpse are hazy concepts in the divine mind, drafts of the future cosmos and the laws that will govern it."

The antiquarianising urge that governs this embarrass de richesses also governs Villet's collages where citations in ancient languages, archaic alphabets and exquisite calligraphy record the holy lore of many cultures. These images flash and gleam, and their burthen of arcane wisdom instils a sense of mystery and transcendental aspiration. Effulgence and insubstantiality purge Villet's creations of materiality, and tinge them with a spiritual glow. Objects are scant, and subordinated to the ground upon which they float. This ground consists of radiant flushes and mists of colour. Strong atmospheric suggestions occur: the artist's forms seem to emerge from a haze irradiated by a hidden sun. The immemorial symbolic import of light clearly ordains that this shimmer and dazzle signify the divine presence. The objects within this ground - calligraphy, musical notations, geometric diagrams and occasional stylised figurations - are all abstract symbols for concrete phenomena. The everyday physical world of substance and gravity dissolves into a luminous fog that returns us to the day before Creation. The deity's blueprint for a newly minted universe of pure geometric forms and Platonic essences appears about to materialise from this inchoate void, and its imminent emergence brings us to the brink of revelation.

Divine creation

What we glimpse are hazy concepts in the divine mind, drafts of the future cosmos and the laws that will govern it. Plato affirmed that elemental geometric configurations attain eternal and absolute beauty because they represent God-given perfection, and Villet's recurring forms - the square, the rectangle, the triangle and the cone - determine the structure of matter, and are thus rooted in the very fabric of the universe. By using these primal shapes to construct her compositions, Villet draws upon the same principles God used to create the world, and theoretically, her work thereby mirrors the splendour of divine creation. The word of God too is embedded within the imagery, and - theoretically again - His dicta possess the miraculous power of the fiat that brought the world into being. Sacred texts in vanished tongues confer canonical authority upon the collages. Staining, fading, blurring, tearing and creasing envelop the words in timeless mystery, and lend them the appearance of hoary archaeological survivals. This screed is kept flush with the picture plane, and it presents like the pages of the open book God presents to mankind in Italian quattrocento frescoes. These are the tablets of the law, the utterances of the absolute. Tragically only fragments survive in a language indecipherable to us. Nevertheless they form a gash in the veil of Maya, a rent through which we dimly glimpse a world beyond the blindness of sight.