FINE ART: Suzy Bell
A NIGHTMARISH sexual experience for young Durban artist Brandon McLeod (23) made him seek therapy in art instead of on the couch. He brazenly explores “the spread of erotics” by juxtaposing images of eroticism and emptiness, fear and fetishism, sexual desire and death. “My work is no poetry,” is the alarmingly honest remark of what this artist calls his “blatant works”.
“I use bright and lewd colours silk-screened onto large pieces of patent vinyl to explore the sexual frontiers of erotomania and fetishist iconography and the excessive commercialism of the Postmodern world.
“It’s the same way Aids victims are treated, in a repetitive way, like Pop Art. I’ve lost some close friends, and I know when they deteriorate they’re treated like worthless human beings. I thematically explore the free marketplace of the Nineties in my art – where sexual desire and HIV infection can be exchanged randomly,” he says.
Although we’re in the Nineties, McLeod’s multiple imagery of giant cock-rings are quite often construed as doughnuts. The written word on this artwork is pretty obvious: “Ram your meat up me, spray me with your spunk, bent over belted, leather master forces submission …”
He uses bright colours to portray the Aids- infected cells which, he says, “act as an entry point to suggest how beautiful they look, but equally as a vital reference point that they’re devastatingly real”.
Although some works are simply repetitive images of seductive pretty boys, McLeod concedes his work is not self-indulgent. “I asked a lot of people what turns them on.” Well, if this is the result then severe punishment could very well be death, and McLeod’s phallic Empire State building lipsticks and yellow polka- dotted threatening heels could say a lot more than Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans.
Durban artist, Andrew Verster, was all praise for McLeod’s work. “I love his passion. This is art with its feet squarely in the middle of life making us take sides,” says Verster.
Brandon McLeod’s work is on show at the Technikon Natal Art Gallery