In Translucent Worlds, Karel Nel draws on decades of travel, reading and close observation. Journeys through Japan and Europe, encounters with writers and artists, and places revisited through memory all become material for a body of work in which geography is rarely fixed.
Nel’s references stretch widely. Bashō’s travels through northern Japan, Hokusai’s views of Mount Fuji and Hiroshige’s Tōkaidō prints appear alongside Brancusi’s journey from Romania to Paris and Gauguin’s departure for Tahiti. Nel has followed some of these paths himself, visiting Brancusi’s studio in Paris, temples in Kyoto and Nara, Uppsala University and the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm.
These places do not return as straightforward travel records. They are filtered through time, memory and drawing, often resurfacing years later in altered form.
In Portrait of Per Wästberg, for example, a library becomes a portrait of the Swedish writer and former chair of the Nobel Committee for Literature. Each coloured line reads as the spine of a book, turning a life shaped by reading into an image built from accumulated knowledge.
Other works begin more physically. Nel has taken rubbings from pavements and architectural surfaces in Paris, using their textures as starting points for drawings that later connect with memories of Brancusi’s studio, forest shrines and temple spaces encountered in Japan.
That movement between distant places is central to the exhibition. A pavement in Paris can lead towards Kyoto; a remembered studio can share visual ground with a shrine or library. Nel does not collapse these places into one another so much as allow associations to gather across them.
Drawing becomes the means through which those connections are tested. His works are carefully constructed, but shifts in perspective, repeated structures and competing vanishing points prevent them from becoming completely settled.
Translucent Worlds is built from that accumulation: places visited, texts read, people encountered and images carried forward long after the original experience has passed.
Images courtesy of Everard Read and Karel Nel.
Exhibition Details
Exhibition
Karel Nel | Translucent Worlds
Venue
Everard Read
2 Jellicoe Avenue
Rosebank, Johannesburg, 2196
Exhibition Dates
2 September – 19 November 2026
Artist-led Walkabouts
Saturday, 5 September 2026 at 11:15
Saturday, 17 October 2026 at 11:00
Saturday, 7 November 2026 at 11:00
Friday, 20 November 2026 at 11:00
