​Contemporary South African Art

Baragwanathi

As is with most of Braam Jruger's paintings, this work is iconographically crammed to the point that one cannot simply look twice.  Known for his deliberate attempts to mislead 'academic interpretations', Kruger cherished obscurity and the absurd.  In an obituary published in 2009.  Sean O'Toole describes his bizaare paintings:  "Encompassing a variety of styles, they range from the fancifully pop and romantically expressionist to the plainky kitsch.  Sometimes flippant, other times gaudy, it is the painter's off-kilter, magpie sensibility that, perhaps, best defines the essence of his appeal".  In Baragwanathi, we are indeed presented with a series of shiny things.  For a viewer familiar with art historical canons, the most recognisable is the nude female figure who is quoted almost directly from Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingre's famous painting The Valpincon Bather made in 1808.  Seated on a bed facing away from the viewer, the study is most closely focused on the flesh of the woman's back, which is expertly rendered despite the challenge of capturing such subtle form.  Poet and art critic, Charles Baudelaire noted the "deep voluptuousness" of the figure but also associated timeless and immobile figure with chasity and restraint.  In Kruger's quotation, he mimics Ingres' virtuosity and form, though adds a layer of faint cracks, emphasising the act of imitation.  Other elements of the Ingres are also transported into Kruger's painting:  the immaculately rendered and detailed drapery of curtains, that give a sense of the theatrical, the light source which is made tangible through a direct spotlight piercing in the sky in the background.

Disrupting the quotation of the bather, however, is a cheeky inclusion of Kruger's self-portrait, peeking out from under the woman's bed.  His signature shoulder-length hair and bushy beard are unmistakable and he folds his arms to rest his chin in his hands with a sense of smug accomplishment.  We don't see much of his body, but he is presumably nude as well.  Kruger was well kown for his fondness of women and in this self-portrait, he looks out at the viewer knowingly, as if he's seen more than the chaste back of Ingres' muse.

Linked in theme, but starkly juxtaposed in style are a pair of armoured rams, painted in a much looser, and less mimetic style.  Kruger often inserted animal figures into his paintings and they are perhaps best understood as his alter egos.  The ram is commonly associated with virility and in this figuration the silvery animal bows in front of Kruger with a subtle, but playful smirk.

Again, juxtaposed in a surrealistic way with the rest of the painting is a detailed background scene. Though classical in its depiction of rolling hills and a winding stream, the idyllic scene is interrupted by a smoking coal-fired power plant.  They hazy horizon has palpable smog hanging over it and in this context, the hole in the sky reads almost as a disruption to the ozone layer indicating a serious threat to the environment.

Kruger's work indeed resists a simple interpretation with each of these elements and it is further annexed by a large gilrt frame and scalloped inset.  Working closely with framers, Kruger often added detailed frams as a final element to his paintings, which accentuate the postmodern self-consciousness of his work.  

In the bottom right-hand corner, Kruger signs the artwork with his age rather than the year.  Having given up full-time painting in the early 1990's, Kruger resumed his practice after suffering a stroke in 2000.  This marked a different period in the artist's oeuvre and from here on, he marks the paintings with yet another self-reference.

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