Soon after his new exhibition went up at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG), Conrad Botes got a letter from a member of the staff. “God has given you a great talent but you have wasted it by blaspheming him.” The letter went on to put Botes in the same category as Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin and Nero — all enemies of Christianity.
The images that probably upset this staff member are among Botes’s glass paintings, a medium he has made his own over the past few years. The glass paintings on this exhibition (Botes’s first solo outing in Johannesburg), are his biggest so far — about 60cm in diameter. Adapting the comic-strip style he has used so brilliantly in the compendium periodical Bitterkomix, Botes puts together hard-edged constellations of imagery that set off all sorts of sparks.
One of the blasphemous works has Jesus, the “Good Shepherd”, bringing home the lost sheep of the flock — except the sheep is a giant phallus. Arranged around Jesus, just beyond his halo of light, are louche girls in bathing suits and other sexual imagery. The image, as a whole, is both wryly amusing and rather touching.
Another glass painting is darker. It features Botes’s black Tintin figure, familiar from previous works, and perhaps something of an Everyman figure in Botes’s iconography. Here the Tintin figure is clearly in hell — he’s sinking into a heap of shit while God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost drool turds down upon him from the sky. The third figure in the trinity, in a superb visual joke, is portrayed in the warped form of Casper the Friendly Ghost.
“What do we perceive as good or bad?” asks Botes philosophically, when asked about the way such images almost inevitably offend people like the gallery staff member. Questions of perception, of the way we read, understand and give meaning to images, inevitably arise from works that throw together different images, drawn from sources as disparate as medical textbooks or movie stills, then collaged against images that seem to rise directly from Botes’s subconscious — such as the little wormy creature with a human face, sticking its head first into this work, then into that.
Botes is both extending his komik style and drawing on his fine art skills. This kind of gallery show demonstrates how inventively he can enrich his repertoire, as it were. There is a large composite work, in which painting, collage and silk-screen are sewn, with machine-embroidery thrown in.
Ashraf Jamal, in his essay for a new Botes catalogue that includes images at the JAG, sees Botes as quintessentially postmodern and indeed “post-human”, in part because of his employment of a hard-edged “pop” style.
But it seems that in some ways Botes, as he raids art history along with pop iconography to stock up his image bank, is pursuing the classic modernist goals of complexity, texture, palimpsest and depth.
His newest works, to go on show later this month at Gallery Momo, are clearly in this idiom: they are drawings done on top of photographs of walls covered with graffiti, producing more layers and sets of images to play off against one another.
Back at the JAG, though, the focus is on the glass paintings. They may be the most obviously beautiful and provocative, but perhaps the most resonant is a set of 15 square glass paintings in delicate shades of grey, making use of found images of dead people.
The effect is the opposite of lurid; there is nothing here that shouts or jokes like the round paintings do. The work is contemplative, melancholy, and very lovely.
And then there’s the sculpture.
“She’s quite dangerous, but also sexual,” says Botes of the naked black female figure with a wrestling mask on and a knife in her hand. She is sur-rounded by severed hands (a frequent motif in the paintings). He based her in part on an image of a Catholic saint, says Botes. “She’s merciful because she only chopped off the hands.”
The details
The Rat in Art: Conrad Botes, Pop and the Postmodern, with an essay by Ashraf Jamal, is published by Erdmann Contemporary, Cape Town. The catalogue is based on the JAG show and a recent exhibition in Italy.
Conrad Botes at the JAG runs until July 17. Botes also exhibits at Gallery Momo, Johannesburg, from May 20.
Fellow Bitterkomix founder Anton Kannemeyer (aka Joe Dog) exhibits at Art on Paper, Melville, Joahnnesburg, until May 20.
Comics Brew, an annual group show of South African and international graphic works, is on at Franchise, 44 Stanley Avenue, Milpark, Johannesburg, until May 23.