Son of Mang is a simple gesture - Mark Braunias boldly placing new work alongside a triptych of charcoal drawings from 1998, and three taut yet utterly satisfying Tooth Head paintings, dated 2015 - 18.

"This exhibition brings together a body of work that connects to an artistic practice twenty years in the making. It pivots around a large 10-panel charcoal work on paper, Mang (1997), held in the Christchurch Art Gallery collection since 2002.

The central core of these works is the artist's long-term investigation into a hybrid of biological shapes and comic figuration, seen through the lens of modernist abstraction. The strict formalism of pictorial space (emphasized by the push and pull of figure/ground) collides with the playful absurdity of the 'Goofy' shapes staring back at the viewer. As images, the forms reference Walt Disney cartoon characters. Their graphic quality, however, suggests a Pop Art sensibility that never settles easily within either genre.

The evolutionary nature of inventing shapes from other shapes and the process of drawing through that in successive bodies of work is, in actual fact, the 'missing link'. These anthropomorphic figures, with names such as Gene Fool, Tooth Head and Joob, can be seen as the genetic spawn of Mang. This is a fertile breeding ground where biology and art share fluids with the asethete and the iconoclast. Is it sardonic abstraction or a celebration of Blobism? Perhaps both, and quite possibly neither (entirely).

Son Of Mang is the artistic progeny where the imagination is the creator, and its genetic inheritance comes from a life-time of inventing and re-inventing forms with DNA deep inside the plastic arts of drawing and painting. It's all in the mind you know. The creative mind really does make Matter matter."

MB
August 2018

Press release courtesy Jonathan Smart Gallery.