2007
Acrylic on canvas
140 x 160cm

For Anton Kannemeyer – co-editor with Conrad Botes of the Bitterkomix series – no image or idea has ever been sacred. His forthright and frank manner is especially refreshing in a country like South Africa, where analysis is frequently stifled because of overriding sensitivities. He unrelentingly exposes the neurosis of the nation and, in particular, of a white minority whose Calvinist and bigoted beliefs blind them to embracing the changes in power and politics.

Kannemeyer’s new work forms part of the Nightmare series, an extension of his Alphabet of Democracy which was included on the 2006 season exhibition at Michael Stevenson. In a recent text written on the occasion of Kannemeyer’s exhibition at The Beam Gallery at Spier, Stellenbosch, Danie Marais reflects on these bodies of work that confront the fears and paranoias of the rainbow nation:

He has turned his focus from the sins, perversions and sexual repression of the fathers to the bigger post-Apartheid picture. The Alphabet still sharply comments on the madness directly below the surface of the rabidly conformist parts of white South African society, especially the Afrikaans community. But as the title indicates, it is also concerned with the current mutations of bigotry bred by political correctness, financial greed and the hollow rainbow and renaissance rhetoric of a new political hierarchy. The use of the word ‘democracy’ becomes subversive in the context of this layered artwork which portrays the liberated South African society and its form of government as just another arbitrary social order fraught with moral ambiguity and human absurdity. Kannemeyer tackles a lot of issues politicians and journalists tend to shy away from by using a mixture of the stereotypes associated with political cartooning and combining it with the deeply personal, the irreverent and the surrealism of the subconscious. His idiosyncratic mash-up of allegory, history, existentialist nausea, self-loathing and nihilism makes for a heady brew …

Kannemeyer’s work is currently included on From and To at Kunst Merano Arte in Merano, Italy.

© 2007 Michael Stevenson. All rights reserved.