Biography
The collaborative duo, AD-Reflex, was formed in 2015 and consists of contemporary South African artists Johan Conradie and KarlGustav Sevenster.
The work of AD-Reflex is about duality and unexpected juxtapositions of beauty and decay. By referencing iconic art historical representations, AD-Reflex draws a parallel between representations of war and power, ranging from classical Greek constructs of heroic masculinity to the way ISIS recently used brutality against cultural artefacts, as a carefully considered ideology of cultural and religious purity. Their central figures show the scars of rituals and faithful violence.
At present their work contemplates the allure and visual history of war and martyrdom, and reminds the viewer that perpetual violence (the barbaric love and violence of power) has become a ‘natural state’ in the 21st century. In Regarding the pain of Others, Susan Sontag (2003:95) poses the question: “Is there an antidote to the perennial seductiveness of war? And is this a question a woman is more likely to pose than a man?” Sontag emphasises that the war machine has a gender, and it is male. Concurrently, AD-Reflex examines the ways in which representations of masculinity and maleness in the media and the history of art produce, challenge and ultimately shape notions of masculinity. Ultimately, their art resists and transcends perceptions of traditional boundaries.
AD-Reflex has a ‘rebellious baroque sensibility’ and creates a tension between abstraction and figuration, control versus freedom, austerity versus exuberance, light and dark, faith versus scepticism, transparency and obscurity, and pathos and drama. Their art is a mixture of meticulous composition and sensual recklessness that penetrate the world of appearances and what it barely conceals. The transformation agents are light, shadow and glossy, seductive surfaces.
Through counterpointing beauty and technology they combine complicated techniques and processes including digital photography, digital art techniques, painting, Swarovski crystals and the physical freezing of objects in ice, which are then re-photographed in a studio. Deploying a sophisticated, poetic dialogue among these media and plumbing the depths of art history and other cultural canons, their visual narratives explore the values, vices and conflicts of contemporary culture in the global sphere.
