ART FOR A WORLD GONE BONKERS
Anxiety and claustrophobia emanate from the canvases. By
It’s a big month for Johannesburg-based artist Jason Bronkhorst. The 41-year-old has two exhibitions in the city this month — one of new work at his longtime gallery Kalashnikovv in Braamfontein, and a retrospective show of older works at Graham’s Fine Art Gallery in Bryanston. A graduate of the National School of the Arts, the largely self-taught painter has often remarked that the creation of artworks is somewhat of a compulsion. His large paintings are evidence of this, combining a variety of materials and processes to create portraits and figurative arrangements that are physically and metaphorically layered. In their distribution of colour and use of flat, often barely outlined figures you can see the influences of Francis Bacon and Robert Hodgins.
But there’s also a use of text and slogans which is used to attract attention to his ideas about South African history and its sometimes bleakly repetitive issues. For Bronkhorst, the colours and layers within his work are physical evocations of the layering of history and the effects of institutional power and memory.
As a white South African Bronkhorst is not ashamed to deal with the contradictions and realities of his identity. There’s an anxiety and claustrophobic pressure that emanates from his canvases, which reflects the difficulties of trying to live one’s day-to-day life in an increasingly mad, mad world.
The world of Trump and Jacob Zuma and North Korea and Syria and Vladimir Putin and Vicki Momberg — a world in which freedom of expression has to live side by side with outpourings of bitter hatred and racism and conspiracy theories.
His Kalashnikovv show is titled “UVB-76,” named after a Russian short-wave frequency which broadcasts a monotonous tone 25 times a minute 24 hours a day at “an uncomfortable pitch of 4625kHz”. No one seems quite sure what the purpose of UVB-76 is but popular legend has it that in the event of a nuclear attack the station’s monotonous buzz would trigger a response meant to neutralise the source of the attack. Push the button and face the wrath of that “uncomfortable pitch of 4625kHz”.
As Bronkhorst sees it, the incessant buzz of the broadcast mirrors the constant and ever more depressing and overwhelming stories that make up our current news cycle, and in his current work there’s an attempt to present scenes and figures within a visual equivalent of this humming, angstinducing malaise.
In paintings like In the Eyes of the Neighbours and its companion In the Eyes of the Labourers — taking their title from James Phillips’s song Shot Down — figures buckle in agony as if dealing with all of this constant noise from both the headlines of the present moment and the pressures of the inescapable legacy of the past is too much to bear.
While there’s certainly a heavy touch of the old waving finger of verkrampte National Party leaders like PW Botha in several of Bronkhorst’s pictures, they blend into the background noise of bright colours with sufficiently effective reminders of their place in the past, though their shadows may still hang over the country they lost in the age of Zuma and state capture.
The correlations between the past and the present are evident throughout the show but the questions they may throw up in viewers across generations are left to interpretation. What’s certain upon coming away from the work is the lingering sense of the heavy and still much-felt legacy of our past on our present. What’s to be done about it is not Bronkhorst’s concern but his distinctive mix of figures, bright backgrounds and scrawled scribbling provide plenty to ponder and paths to meander while doing so. That’s undoubtedly helped by his sly inclusion of references to current and historical events, popular culture and mass media.
His compulsion to pour out his thoughts and worries has produced images of distinct eeriness that have captured the attention of audiences at art fairs and galleries over the years because there’s something undeniably arresting within them that’s hard to ignore.
They’re not comforting but rather uncomfortable while also managing to intrigue the eye — and that’s a hard-won skill for any artist. For those who like their art with a little think in it the two current shows provide plenty of opportunity for Bronkhorst fans to look at and think about long after they’ve left.
Freedom of expression has to live side by side with outpourings of bitter hatred
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UVB-76 is the final show at Gallery Kalashnikovv’s current premises in Smit Street. It runs until April 25. Gallery Kalashnikovv will move to new premises in the 70 Juta complex in Braamfontein next month.