FINE ART: Hazel Friedman –
PHILIP BADENHORST’s exhibition would make interesting “reading” were it not for his desire to make his mark as a neo-expressionist high-tech symbolist. Ultimately that is what one retains of his work – the mark – violent slashes of reds, blues and black. And while vibrant, colourful and certainly evocative, it fails to reach the promise suggested by its process.
Merging painting with computerised imagery and techniques, Badenhorst decorates pages from an illustrated Dutch translation of novels by Charles Dickens.
He then scans these in colour on computer and magnifies them before printing and painting them by hand. Although the enlarged images are clearly intended to have a separate identity, their painted tattoos and signs become crude enlargements of their daintier counterparts.
Badenhorst has chosen A Tale of Two Cities as his principal text source for his Pages of Life series. The title harks back to a world prior to the automatisation of reading, when the book served a rather different function in the reproduction of culture to the role it plays today. It was primarily a patriarchal activity and an index of social status – essentially a public event performed on the hearth of a middle-class home.
But Badenhorst’s imagery, techniques of production and the display of his Pages of Life paintings do not simply highlight the tension be-tween the different concepts of mass production. His choice of book title evokes the sense of a divided society, which will not pass unnoticed by South Africans ( given his selection of Dutch as textual translation).
But the issues of economic history, social conflict and art-historical discourse (the tension between manual and computerised pro-cesses for example) touched on by Badenhorst are not stretched to their conceptual potential. Badenhorst takes refuge, instead, in the artist’s mark behind the safety net of esoteric symbols. And his work reads like an entertaining novel with an unfulfilling conclusion.