Frikkie Eksteen

Artist Statement
The biggest obstacle to making an artwork that responds to Bosch is exactly what makes his work exceptional: uncanny imagination, technical precision and a mathematician’s sense of design. I decided from the outset that I won’t meet this challenge head on, and if anything, that I would respond to the brief – and to Bosch – in a more intuitive way. So instead of conceiving a new work, I decided to tackle a half-finished painting that has been in my studio for a few years and to somehow infuse it with something Bosch. This incomplete work was a rough sketch of digitally altered figures based on portrait paintings of vice-chancellors in the University of Pretoria collection. It was part of an ongoing experiment where the role of portrait painting within institutional narratives is examined.

Unlike Bosch’s meticulously arranged hell panels, this meeting of formal portraiture and perdition turned out to be a bit of a mess. Swarms of brush strokes that both disrupt the surface and seem to appear from its depths are conceivable counterparts to his precisely delineated tiers of demons and lost souls. It’s a more disorderly kind of hell, but its physics are similar. As the title suggests, this painting has turned out to be part institutional critique and part apocalypse. It is an unlikely combination, but in view of recent events at universities perhaps not so inappropriate.

tongues confused, a language strained in anguish with cadences of anger, shrill outcries and raucous groans that joined with sounds of hands,

raising a whirling storm that turns itself forever through that air of endless black, like grains of sand swirling when a whirlwind blows.

Dante Alighieri, Inferno

Sourced From: http://boschinafrica.co.za/

frikkie eksteen (b 1973)
‘second state’ | thu 9 jun – sat 9 jul 2016

Frikkie Eksteen, Gathering at the Monument, Oil, spraypaint and inkjet print on canvas, 123 x 123 cm, 2015 – 2016