thank you for mending me babies

FPRYEFX
.... that's what she said?



Each of Bratsa Bonifacho's paintings is composed in a very similar and specific way: every individual work is split up into a grid of equally portioned boxes, filled with different colored symbols (either letters, numbers, or pictures). They are large in scale, alarmingly colorful, and a little overwhelming.

I was initially interested in Bonifacho's work because it seems to reference a number of Jasper John's paintings (via Numbers In Color, for example). I'm attracted to both artists' paintings for similar reasons, but they represent different things to me. Both artists use arbitrary but iconic symbols (numbers, letters, simple silhouettes) to celebrate color and form while demanding specific reactions and associations: that is, it is impossible to look at works like Bonifacho's Decoder What!! and not recognize the letters and punctuation marks as part of our own coveted language.

In his latest series Human Farm, Bonifacho takes these ideas a step further, this time specifically focusing on the scripting of computer viruses. In these pieces, he imitates the effects of said viruses by scrambling the letters int he pictures in the paintings, allowing them to flow out of their clean boxes and distort one another. (Hello Jasper Johns 2.0.) This is indicative of the many layers of confusion and chaos that result from such sicknesses. The swirling forms begin to make their own organic forms, precarious and destructive.

To me, the paintings signify something well beyond the tension between elegance and resulting catastrophe of computer bugs. I understand Bonifacho's pieces as representations of the fragility of humanity, both culturally and physically. By knocking the letters of their clean-cut boxes, Bonifacho creates a violent atmosphere out of something we are so comfortable with and jaded by that it creates the ultimate benign atmosphere. (Words should be soothing, right?)

Indeed, the effects of computer viruses are easily comparable with that of human diseases, a topic that I explore in much of my own work. When the sickness strikes, all of the essential pieces are still there, the letters, numbers, pictures, but their infrastructure slowly begins to collapse, forming something beautiful but utterly crushing and painfully differently. The landslide of symbols create the illusion of toppling downward upon a slippery slope that they have no chance of climbing up again.

pictured above:

top: detail shot, De Viribus Quantitatus, 48" x 48," oil on canvas
top right: Decoder What!!, 48" x 48," oil on canvas
left: Tarabuste, 54" x 67," oil on canvas
bottom right: Sekretum Sekretorum, 52" x 58," oil on canvas
all courtesy of the artist's website