“The Valley of the Red Gods is a place of fleeting wonder. Each year, the red disas bloom briefly , a moment of intensity and brilliance that transforms the ordinary landscape into something sacred. In this series, I explore impermanence, reverence, and the ephemeral power of nature. These works invite you to witness beauty that cannot be held forever, to pause in awe, and to reflect on the cycles of life, loss, and renewal.”

-Cathy Layzell

Cathy Layzell is a South African painter renowned for her command of colour and her ability to translate the natural world into immersive abstraction. Rooted in close observation of landscape, her practice is informed by rivers, vegetation, and the shifting optics of light on water. Rather than describing nature literally, Layzell distils its energy, movement, saturation, reflection, into layered, gestural compositions.

Layzell’s work carries a quiet mysticism. Paint behaves as water behaves, pooling, refracting, dissolving form. Surfaces oscillate between opacity and translucence, drawing the viewer into a space where reflection is both visual and psychological. The eye is never fixed; it drifts, recalibrates, returns.

The Valley of the Red Gods takes its conceptual and chromatic cue from the Red Disa (Disa uniflora), an iconic and rare orchid endemic to the Western Cape. Found along mountain streams and waterfalls on the slopes of Table Mountain, the Red Disa blooms briefly yet spectacularly, its scarlet petals appearing almost otherworldly against stone and water. It is a flower bound to place, dependent on precise ecological conditions , flowing water, altitude, light.

In this body of work, the Red Disa is not depicted but invoked. Its intensity reverberates through Layzell’s palette: reds bleed into blues, florals fracture into reflections, colour becomes atmosphere. The paintings function like pools of water , mirrored surfaces that collapse depth, time, and form.

This exhibition positions abstraction as a form of reverence. Nature is not romanticised , it is entered. Layzell’s paintings ask the viewer to slow down, to look as one looks into water , aware that what is seen is inseparable from what is felt.

The Valley of the Red Gods is ultimately about presence: the fleeting, the sacred, and the act of seeing itself.

Cathy Layzell

Working in a gestural and abstract style, Cathy Layzell investigates humankind’s evolving relationship with nature, where an impulse to shape, tame, and control the natural world coexists with a desire to yield to its wildness and danger.

At close range, Layzell’s paintings are constructed from the textures of nature—rock, foliage, air, and water—and appear nearly abstract, resembling a dancing network of innumerable brushstrokes.

When painting, she strives for unconscious creation, embracing the notion that the image is painting itself through her and that she is collaborating in something greater than herself. There is an element of unknowing and surrender into possibilities beyond her control.

Layzell studied at Rhodes University and completed a postgraduate diploma in Fine Art from Michaelis School of Fine Art in 2013. From 2003 to 2007, she returned to the Painting School of Montmirail in the South West of France (near Toulouse), where she developed her life-long interest in colour theory. Layzell exhibited extensively in the UK before returning to Cape Town in 2008.

Layzell has taken part in several exhibitions with Eclectica Contemporary and held a solo exhibition titled Dark Forest in 2024. Layzell has participated in FNB Art Joburg, in 2024 with Eclectica Contemporary gallery.