LIGHTNESS OF FORM
David Brits’s installation for the Spier Light Art Festival marks a glittering finale for a year of significant development for the artist
It’s recommended that one becomes acquainted with the name David Brits. If the vision board spread across the studio wall of this multidisciplinary artist makes the dreams it discloses come to pass, then, over the next 10 years, Brits’s works will have existed in every significant sculpture park in the world. The 32-year-old Capetonian is not one for idle daydreams. The board’s displayed images of parks, fairs, collections and publications in which he wishes to have his artwork presented are propelling him to realise his ambitions. Brits has already transformed some of the printed pictures into real-life occurrences.
He recently created a performative sculpture at Nirox’s arteBOTANICA, two months after launching eight monumental works under the title of Ouroboros during Joburg Art Week. In February he will have a colossal piece exhibited outside the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town.
The fact that sculpture is only a recent expression for this Michaelis-trained fine artist makes such achievements all the more remarkable. In February Brits revealed his foray into public sculpture when he unveiled ‘Red Edge’ at the Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation near Masiphumelele in Cape Town. This striking red piece, and the subsequent blackpigmented Ouroboros series (named after a snake devouring its tail), had been three years in the making — a period of intense experimentation with material and form.
Taking the serpentine drawings for which he had become known, and which had already gained him recognition with a solo show of drawings at SMITH Gallery in 2015, Brits sought to transform them into objects for public enjoyment. “They’re a continuation of my work, but in three-dimensional form,” he says, describing them as “the edifice” of an energy he has been cultivating — one that saw him prototyping with everything from expanding foam, ducting and insulation tubes filled with resin to watering hoses, mooring rope and steel rods. His studio holds “boxes of failures” to remind him of his journey.
Success in the quest to fashion huge, freestanding, twisted tubular forms, whose loops never touch, came after more than 30 months of perseverance. Both strength and lightness were actualised with Brits’s pioneering method of combining carbon fibre, polyethene foam, resin, fibre-glass weaves and a coating that includes quartz crystals. “Their weightlessness has become invisible to me,” he says of the perception of physical impossibility that leaves viewers in awe. “It’s like I’m the magician and I know the magic trick.”
The latest trick up his sleeve is that of a light-filled white-papery Tyvek tube created in collaboration with Thingking, which has been “woven” into an old oak tree for the Spier Light Art Festival. Fire Snake’s 70m form, fitted with pulsating LEDs, will be doing what Brits wishes on all his sculptures: “Redefining the experience of a space.”
Considering he calls the inventive aviator siblings the Wright Brothers his “spiritual benefactors”, it’s not surprising that such imagination drives his innovation. “What you hold in your mind tends to manifest,” he says.