DATE: 17-11-24
TIME: 20:58
AUTHOR: MANGA NGCOBO
STUDIO PHOTOGRAPHY: KYLE THOMSON
IMAGE COUNT: 10
TAGS: X
A solitary line begins its journey as a point beneath a graphite stem. Painstakingly it charters its course across canyons of other lines which, at a glance, look just like the line in question. Under a microscope however, it is an ecosystem of symbiotic variance. This line, like all the others produced before it, is sober and fierce and faithfully ready to take its place in the oeuvre of Johannesburg based artist Kaellik Dullaart’s loyal legion of marks and contours.
The line is the indivisible unit at the heart of Dullaart’s practice. Each mark is celebrated, in the inconceivable mass of lines that make up his compositions, with the pedanticness of a monk-like photorealist but the with attitude of ‘no-fucks-given’ punk rocker. The dizzying scale and the rate of production are seemingly born of a meditative state that is the envy of Olympic level yogis. When you take a step back and adjust the magnification, the lines dissolve into value and tone on pieces of paper so large it's cruel.
The compositions are also equally complex and carnivalesque, often depicting herds and walls of bodies strewn across space and without a hierarchy that singles out our individual figures. Some are Guernicas for 21st century technological torment, with faces framed by red boxes of facial recognition software employed by an all-seeing state. Others are mountain ranges of cascading bodies crawling over each other, fueled only by the motivation to be ahead of the next crawling body. The bedrock of Kaelik’s latest body of work is alienation — the alienation of the herd. Although drawn in millimetric proximity, the spiritual and social gulf between each body is immense. A triptych entitled “Ensure That a Stranger Feels Ashamed” is a monotype that stacks bodies and magnifies faces. The magnification, however, does not increase detail and resolution of facial anatomy, but the seedy-eyed stagnant paranoia of modern social anatomy— a dismembered body politik.
The other parts of the series include monotypes that defy the precision of his notorious line work. The line is now a generous blotch of ink swept through to create beastly ephemera. Two animal heads that are somewhere between lion and killer-robot clash over a red Barbara-Krugeresque sign that pointedly reads “ANGST”, as if to magnify past the image and past the line all the way down to the germ of the idea: a mammalian battle against one of the hallmarks of the human condition. His solitary line lends itself as a metaphor for a western brand of solitude born out of the idea of individuality. Kaelik recognises that the line’s function is dependent on the constellation of lines around it.
The paradox of the whole operation is how the brutal and paranoid hyperbole of his commentary are accommodated in his decidedly monastic practise. The virtues of isolation are contaminated by unavoidable socialization. He becomes a hermit who descends from the mountain to stand barefoot in gridlock traffic to get a feel for the rogue, entropic texture of modernity. This way chaos is not viewed as a disruptor of meditative states but as another object reflected in consciousness.
Kaelik is an artist who came into the public imagination partly via his black pen drawings, depicting mythology and the occult with his idiosyncratic line work. Those drawings made reference to many of the mythologies of the world, but included some invented aspects. In many of his works he makes use of the wimmelbilderbuch style where many scenes are depicted simultaneously within an undetectable micro-hierarchy. Wimmel comes from the word wimmeln which means “to teem”. This is the genre of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, and is perhaps most famously recognized in the Where is Waldo picture books. This format of a dizzying agglomeration of happenings gives Dullaart the ability to mythologise and brush up with the occult on the same plane that he depicts the quotidian and profane. His omnipotent display of complexity and contradiction allow him to be a prophet of the contemporary in all of its variance.
In one of these wimmelbilderbuchs the figures are holding up the phones as if taking a selfie. Each face is framed by a red square reminiscent of the kind of weird facial approximations that beta AI engines are guilty of when producing peripheral faces in prompted renderings. When he pastiches this effect he approximates current anxiety into masks of horrific pleasure. In this process, the purity of his line is contaminated by technology— by feeding his drawings into AI generators and then recreating them in graphite, charcoal, ink or other analogs. This creates a cross-pollination of intelligences— analog and digital— that act in concert to produce new textures and new ways for his line to behave.
His line? Now we enter the murky waters of signature and ownership. Kaelik feeding the lines and marks into AI isn't too dissimilar to the case of Getty, the stock photo juggernaut. This year Getty filed a lawsuit against Stability AI for using 12 million Getty stock photographs for its prompt generators to learn from, resulting in distorted versions of its watermark being featured in the resulting images. Everyone’s IP is arguably subject to the same fate. In A world where even trade- marks belong to the commons the idea of signature becomes increasingly lukewarm. This body of work is Dullaart jumping into the fire.
What became apparent in our conversations was how he was interested in how we are inadvertently teaching AI about ourselves — particularly our fantasies and fears. Every search should theoretically help render a more comprehensive map of our psyches. A cloud of dopamine data-points containing a perfectly bespoke pleasure suit looms above us all. Kaelik keenly observes the scary implications of what he calls “the perfect fantasy for everyone”. After all, what’s scarier than a lifetime of forceful satiation? A compulsory hedonism. A perpetual post-nut clarity.
Despite Kaelik’s apparent artistic hermeticism he is keenly aware of what it means to wield a persona in the art world. In the current paradigm where signature invariably supersedes art or where art-fairs are another medium, Dullaart has built a practice that enables his art to stand alone and with stand change. All the while he remains unsentimental about his signature - feeding it to other intelligences, allowing it to take new forms, welcoming adulteration, letting it go.