From the first known Ukiyo-e woodblock paintings that emerged in Kyoto and Osaka in the early 1600s, to the flat two-dimensional forms of the French Post-Impressionist painters and the propagandistic Soviet film and political posters of Vladimir and Georgii Stenberg, I’ve always had a soft spot for graphic art.
Ever since I first drank in the lush colour of Henri Toulouse-Lautrec’s oh-so-sexy posters for the Moulin Rouge, I’ve been a sucker for the ‘take that’ confidence of intense flat colour, hard lines and clear shapes. The infectious immediacy and direct, economical language of posters and prints shouts out to the metropolitan Joe Soap in me. And certain contemporary images hold inside them a formal heritage that stems back to the late 19th century when the lithographic poster turned the streets of Paris, Milan and Berlin into galleries for the masses, ushering in the modern age of advertising.
For someone so taken with strong lines and unequivocal shapes it’s been a bumper month in Joburg, with Conrad Botes’ Crime and Punishment opening at Brodie/Stevenson and Fiona Pole’s Heartland/Heartlines gently wooing passersby into Art on Paper Gallery. The moods of these two shows couldn’t be more different. Whereas Pole’s show is whimsical, nostalgic, gently pensive, slightly torn, Botes’ solo is a take-no-prisoners exploration of the spiritual and physical torments that plague this mortal coil. What they have common is a tight graphic quality that punches straight.
Pole, who was born in Benoni in 1974, now lives and works in Paris. This show captures that achey-breakey emigré sense of duality in relation to the notion of place or home. But it does so simply and cleanly with a carefully chosen vocabulary of simple iconic shapes: a suitcase, an aeroplane, a bicycle, a red dress, a map, a picnic blanket… In many ways, Pole’s prints evoke the writing of that other South African Parisian, Denis Hirson, whose I Remember King Kong the Boxer, is an all-time classic text grappling with notions of absence and memory in relation to that lost childhood sense of place.
In keeping with the simplicity of her figurative silhouettes, Pole works with a reduced palette of ivory, charcoal and red. Her minimalist hues are delightfully, elegantly Parisian in their pared down authenticity. As simple and delicious as a freshly-baked croissant on a Saturday morning in Le Marais. For me Pole’s paintings function like quietly haunting haikus. They’re the kind of images a person can live with.
But it’s not summertime and the living is not always easy. So on to Crime and Punishment at Brodie/Stevenson. It’s been five long years since Botes’ 2004 Forensic Theatre show at MOMO, and this current solo is all Joburg audiences will need to convince them of why he has been hitting the big time in recent years. Apart from being the invited artist at this year’s Aardklop festival, Botes participated in the 2009 Festival international de la bande dessinee de Angoulême in France. Other group exhibitions include the third Guangzhou Triennial, China (2008) and Apartheid: The South African Mirror at the Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona (2007) amongst others.
This show is evidence of an artist in full grasp of his powers. If you look around, there’s a sad lack of good draftsmanship on the contemporary scene – particularly amongst younger emerging artists. Here is a deliciously satisfying antidote, with Botes’ easy formal accomplishment being a tonic before you’ve even got started on the depth of his content and overall unity of effect in terms of metaphoric language. Works on the exhibition take the form of wall drawings, large-scale reverse glass paintings, sculpture and installation, each rendered with the kind of formal authority you can trust. That, however, is where the easy emotion ends.
A master of provocation since the early 90s, Botes was the co-founder of the Bitterkomix series, and this show continues in the healthy tradition of plentiful depictions of exposed male genitalia. More than that though, it lives up to its epic title, being a heady tussle with the whole notion of being tried and tested in the full blown, guilt soaked, Old Testament, Dostoyevskian sense of things. His is a hell and brimstone, tattoos and rings of fire kind of odyssey across the desert plains of selfhood – the kind of show Johnny Cash could have written songs about. But Botes’ style remains paradoxically 2-D and pop. So there’s this bouncy tension between his flat, linear, naïve figurative renderings and the complex metaphorical soup in which they’re swimming.
On the surface it might seem like you’re dealing with a comic book, but there’s nothing linear about the narratives these images evoke. From biblical palm trees and fish to desert plains, skulls, crosses, snakes and ladders, branded flesh and the flames of damnation, Botes depicts man’s struggle with his own conscience, an inability to come to terms with the heinousness of his own actions and thoughts.
In a narrative panel of small framed drawings, entitled The Stolen Shadow Story, a man wrestles with a wolf-like beast, then liberates another trapped being from inside the bowels of the beast. Who is the man inside the beast? And who is his rescuer? The gallery is a maze of doppelgangers and doubles. Twins? Ego and id? As you like it. This is a distinctly postmodern world in which Biblical characters inhabit the same plane as Anubis, the jackal-headed Egyptian god of the afterlife. Tidy chronological narratives give way to a more chaotic kind of zombie logic that is liberating and scary all at once. But even in this abject neverland, the stain of morality still looms large. Not even the wildest dog of a man seems to be capable of escaping the flea-ridden kennel of his own blasted conscience.