PHOTOS BY PAUL BARBERA
For Brazilian artist Antonio Bokel, arriving at the Sid Lee creative offices in Amsterdam this May — where he was about to spend two weeks doing on-site prep for an in-house exhibition — was like a dream come true. For starters, the city’s garbagemen had just gone on strike, leaving mountains of detritus for him to incorporate into his Twombly-esque compositions. And then there was the location itself, arranged for him by local curator and writer Alexandra Onderwater: Having gone to school for graphic design, Bokel has spent nearly a decade using the visual tools of advertising and propaganda against themselves, Shepard Fairey-style, and here he was setting up shop in the back of a marketing agency. The juxtaposition “was a big influence on the show,” he says of his final installation, layered with spray paint, found objects, and words bleeding onto the walls.
Bokel’s brand of subversion isn’t quite so obvious to the untrained eye: Rather than aggressively repurposing corporate logos and Russian phrases, Bokel questions the contemporary use of symbolism through repetition, typography, and imagery borrowed from old books. He cites Philippe Starck and David Carson among his influences, and his work has a strong street-art aesthetic, with cartoon-like figures and graffiti scrawls. “I try to make deep thoughts less heavy, more soft,” says the artist. For the Sid Lee show, he found fodder in a book of children’s experiments on matter and energy he picked up off the street, copying and pasting cutesy images of people twirling paper birdcages and licking objects charged with static electricity, then scrawling texts from the book across the walls. It dovetailed nicely with his current obsession with Carl Jung. “Trying to comprehend energy is like trying to find a balance between the unconscious and the rational,” he explains. Other items were purchased rather than scavenged; on one canvas, a wooden stake supports the head of a stuffed-animal pig, which Bokel bought at the famed Albert Cuyp street market behind the agency and then decapitated.
For Bokel, harvesting materials on the fly was partly a practical matter, working as he was beyond the resources of his studio in Rio de Janeiro. He had only one-and-a-half weeks to prepare the show, and he traveled to Amsterdam with nothing. But this methodology — which he’s employed in the past for other international shows — also stretches back to his formative experiences with art, and to the nanny who taught him how to paint. A descendant of the African slaves Bokel’s grandparents employed on their farm, she took care of him as a child when his parents were off traveling, and was entirely self-educated. “She used to paint rustic landscapes of the farm she grew up on, and sometimes I mixed these with paintings of the postcards my mother brought back from her travels,” he says. “Then I introduced her to paint with me European landscapes, cheeseburgers, and Coca-Cola. I loved her, because she was really creative and used to construct toys for me with things she found in the garbage.”
The nanny was one of the few teachers Bokel’s had throughout his life with whom he actually got along, having fought mercilessly with his design-school professors about what lines he would and wouldn’t cross in the service of a client. “I never actually had a client, because I could never do something I didn’t believe in,” he says. “When I got out of university I worked for a perfume label, but I quit after one week.” But spending time in the Sid Lee office hunched over his artwork instead of a computer, he felt right at home. “It’s the same language, but I use it as a design rebel instead.”
“AAAAA,” an exhibition by Brazilian artist Antonio Bokel, runs through the end of June at Sid Lee gallery in Amsterdam.
