Info: Gregarious to the point of being effusive, Johannesburg's Giorgio Trobec is an easily likeable artist, the very antithesis of the broody dreamer who dribbles paint on a canvas and then expects others to recognize the work of a genius. Trobec is almost child-like in his very real enthusiasms. He says that he does not like art that is too realistically representational and this is why he allows his imagination to run wild when he depicts a harbour or a landscape. His boats have vast prows, stern lines that wriggle their way across the canvas, doors that abut at crazy angles. He uses colour with a gleeful abandon that is all the more effective for its impact. Fauvism is very much a colourist's medium. I am intrigued that since he changed styles and here I must add that I genuinely admired much of Trobec's earlier abstract work), his sales have gone into orbit. I am even more intrigued that, in so many respects, Trobec's work is of the same genre as Portchie, another fauvist de luxe and whose paintings virtually run out of galleries such as Alice Art. This implies that South Africans, or at least those South Africans who are still buying art in quite big numbers, are partial to this sort of work and that styles do change in art. Trobec was born in Italy, within the ancient city gates of the renaissance city of Florence of St Valentines day in 1944. His father scootered the family around on a Lambretta and I ask him if this is where he started storing those mental images of Italian seaside villages with deep blue seas, cobbled streets and boats packed to the gills. "Very much yes," he replies. "I remember them so clearly. Those seaside towns and the countryside of Tuscany. Both have formed a strong basis for my art in recent years. I must add that I don't like to have too clear a memory of those places we visited. I enjoy a vision, perhaps some small detail and then I use my imagination to tease out the painting. I am not trying to make a work that is indistinguishable from a photograph. I want to make a painting that says this work is by Giorgio Trobec. They are playful, fun and usually everything is very disproportionate in size." Trobec is yet another artist who has found a degree of acknowledgement and certainly far more sales through his association with Alice Art and her various galleries. His work is popular because it is well-priced, unusual, enormously decorative and yet distinctively different. His movement into the new style has certainly paid off.