There is a bottomless black hole in the Royal Academy’s colossal survey of South African artist William Kentridge. It appears on screen, a seething, gaping disc that circles and swirls, occasionally flecked with a dot of light to indicate some endless passage downwards. It is nothing more than an animated drawing, and the simplest thing here, yet it represents two terrors at once: our common fear of falling, and the full horror of sweated labour down a mineshaft.
Kentridge (born 1955) is the most productive and ingenious animator in international art, the polemical bite of his charcoal lines running all the way back to Goya, Daumier and the German expressionists. His technique – neither imitated nor surpassed – is familiar by now yet never ceases to mesmerise. Instead of the successive drawings, one to each frame, that make up most animations, Kentridge has for many decades worked with a single image for each scene that is drawn and redrawn, erased and altered using charcoal and a rubber.
