Peter Bonde at DCA - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Art in America, Feb, 1995 by Richard Vine

Nothing would be easier--or more unfortunate--than to deplore Peter Bonde's work before actually seeing it. In reproduction, this Danish artist's paintings and photographs convey a sickly presence and a puerile grossness of subject matter--images of dirty plates on a cracker-strewn floor; close-ups of the scrawny Bonde, dressed in shorts, making fart noises by squeezing his palm under his armpit or knee joint; canvases carefully littered with cigarette butts; fields of slathered paint inscribed with a repeated quasi-obscenity like "BEAVER."

Then, too, there are the--well--deviant modes of composition. Bonde makes some works by putting a plastic bag over his head and tonguing paint onto a canvas, some by swigging black acrylic from a bottle and spitting at a white background, some by vomiting directly onto a dark monochrome surface. All in all, it's enough to invite the pronouncement that obnoxiousness cannot be raised to an art form, even by the cleverest irony.

Thus one was utterly unprepared for the bizarre but persuasive beauty of the works in Bonde's first New York solo. Several pieces were hung conventionally on the walls, but half a dozen others dangled from the ceiling--prompting an almost sculptural, kinesthetic engagement--in the artist's own mazelike installation. Powerfully over-lifesized, the tight shots of Bonde making rude sounds or swilling mouthfuls of paint exhibit an abstract quality that does not diminish the disturbing specificity of their images. The flesh tones have a rosy pinkishness, effectively echoed in the abstract painting Wet Pants Contest #4, made by smearing vaginal deodorant on canvas. Others, such as those in which Bonde wears transparent gloves and an ominous head bag streaked at the mouth in a parody of a torturer's--or victim's--hood, are screened with a unifying tone, often an unnatural green. All the photos have been computer digitized and fed through an ink-jet printer onto enormous sheets of vinyl. The resultant colors are, like the show as a whole, at once strangely luscious and alienating--a perfect vehicle for the artist's favored push-pull of attraction and revulsion.

Color is also cunningly chosen in the paintings, whether serving as an activated backdrop for Bonde's one-word messages or as a stand-alone element. The paint-handling itself is expert and confident. Spaghetti is a deftly tangled swirl of energized lavender. The continuous green loops behind the text of Barf, Barf are engagingly bright and energetic. Spit Painting, though generated literally through hawking up acrylics, has a cloudy, brooding Ab-Ex elegance. If Bonde is mocking high-art abstraction and oldfashioned pictorial quality, he is doing so with such fluency as to reaffirm their fundamental worth.

Indeed, despite the "spew" metaphor suggested by his vomit paintings, the 36-year-old Bonde remains free of the two greatest banes in contemporary art--unmediated confessionalism and naive sociopolitical evangelism. If hope can still arise from esthetic squalor, it will come with the maturing of astute and technically skilled practitioners like Bonde.