ProPaganDaDa

Text by Pierre Olivier Rollin, «Corps-à-corps».

To understand an exhibition of South African artist Kendell Geers (May 1968) no attempt should be made to find an explanation but rather allow a body to body (Corps-à-corps) encounter with his work, albeit let the body set off its faculties of anguish, terror, repulsion, disgust, violence… as well as its counterparts: joy, ecstasies, fascination, desire… or even adopt a somewhat less prestigious approach concerned with spirituality, shamanism, etc.

Geers delights in disentangling logical paradoxes whether pertaining to the intellectual, the visual arts, to emotions or ethics, hence the Virgin Mary becomes a porn star, fear indulges desire, trivia mingles with beauty, the spiritual strength of fetishism revives, barbed wire turns into a cross, painting becomes blotchy, a totem is covered in bronze, and so on. In this exhibition the crudest oppositions enter into confrontation in what is meant to be a thwarting corporal experience where the viewer is prompted to rebel or even become part and parcel of this unspeakable quagmire.