2007
Acrylic paint, oil-based paint on glass, enamel on obechie wood
Figure 95cm high, installation dimensions variable

Conrad Botes’ first solo show at Michael Stevenson, Satan’s Choir at the Gates of Heaven, took place in May 2007 and was accompanied by a catalogue with an essay by Ivor Powell. Commenting on Botes’ iconography, Powell wrote:

The spiritual stratum that Botes mines is an archaeological and largely decomposed mulch of broken images, holy books and shattered votive statues – the detritus of the imagery of the Christian religion, left over when God died. Its discursive elements – devils, the sacraments of salvation, the conundrums of passion, divinity and mortality, the mystical narrative of good versus evil – continue to carry an archetypal and visceral charge, a kind of trace memory of their formerly numinous status. But, in a reappropriation that is as much post-modern as it is post-existentialist, Botes’ symbols are cut off from their symbolic reference and the version of the world which guaranteed their meaningfulness in the first place. They are crippled and radically dysfunctional – manifesting more their own redundancy than anything else – no longer capable of transcendence, or even of saving themselves. The numinous reduced in the cauldron of discourse to splatter.

Botes points to the primacy of drawing in his work – whether as the basis for the comics he produces as one half of the Bitterkomix duo (with Anton Kannemeyer), or the diverse media which he brings together in the gallery context. His new piece, Requiem, is a case in point, combining sculpture, reverse-glass painted roundels and wall painting – the latter medium increasingly favoured by Botes as a way to experiment technically with format and scale. Another large wall work incorporating roundels, titled Foreign Body, can be seen on Apartheid: The South African Mirror at the Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona (until 13 January 2008), travelling to Fundacion Bancaja, Valencia (5 February – 30 April 2008).

© 2007 Michael Stevenson. All rights reserved.