by

Kilmany-Jo Liversage

Kilmany-Jo Liversage and the Stealthy Subject by Michael Smith

The street is an endlessly productive motif for the modern age. From Jim Morrison crooning ‘the streets are fields that never die’ through to British rapper Mike Skinner’s long-term project named, simply, The Streets, these strips of asphalt and concrete that connect us are more than just useful pathways. They’re conceptual arenas in which the dramas of contemporary culture - fashion, advertising and graffiti - play out. And so, it is significant that Kilmany-Jo Liversage’s oeuvre has unfolded as a kind of homage to street art, to advertising culture and to fashion images. Hers is an avowedly urban practice, even though it almost always happens in the traditional art studio.

Liversage began working with spray paint around 2003, and almost immediately it transformed her methodology. Her previous interests had been in repetitious work; Jacqueline Flint wrote in 2018 that the artist’s earlier works from the mid-1990s “incorporated found material – ribbons, precisely folded and pinned; chopsticks meticulously layered and placed”. And although her work since then has shown gutsy looseness and painterliness, one can detect that this slow building up is still a key part of constructing images in her mature work. Pixels, almost-submerged tags, truncated arabesques of spray paint mark – these all become the replacements for individual units in Liversage’s large-scale portraits and still life paintings.

Liversage is quick to point out that she isn’t a street artist. Rather, like the Pop Artists of the 1960s, she is concerned with elevating the ubiquitous visual culture of contemporary life to the status of art, and in the process flattening the divides between them. Hers is an art that seeks to create something permanent out of the temporary, the fleeting. In fact, it is this impulse that makes hers a powerful way of working. In a work from 2020 titled HERRA1220(), the rendering of a very contemporary face and figure in progressively fluid sprayed marks results in a portrait of Mannerist poise and timelessness: it echoes the regal bearing of Parmigianino’s sitters. Furthermore, the layers of history seem to find a very modern metaphor in Liversage’s method: some passages in the painting resemble the palimpsestic nature of layers street art accrued over time. Liversage’s works seem to move back and forth through time and history, collapsing centuries of painting traditions into one another.

An even more recent work, 2021’s FERVA (which is also the tile of the artist’s latest show) makes an even stronger link between art history and pop culture. The head-and-shoulders figure, jutting suddenly into the canvas from the bottom right upwards, has something of Caravaggio’s drama about it. Especially in his single-sitter portraits, the Baroque master knew how to compose the picture plane to maximize the effect. He was also no stranger to the thrill of the androgyne: his Boy Bitten by a Lizard and Boy with a Fruit Basket are arguably early statements of gender fluidity or, at very least, a sexually ambiguous bodily- and facial aesthetic. The figure in Liversage’s FERVA skirts a similar divide, not clearly male or female, a factor amplified by the intentionally gender-blurring haute fashion item the figure is wearing.

The notion of ‘the gaze’ is one which many of Liversage’s works unpack. A familiar tenet of feminist theory as it pertains to art is that, for centuries, the male gaze dominated, and that it engendered (pun intended) an asymmetry of power, since it was almost always women who were being looked at, recorded, ‘consumed’ by male artistic eyes. The mere fact that Liversage is a woman, claiming the role of portrait painter, shifts the dynamics somewhat. Add to that her ability to get her over-life-sized faces to fix the viewer with confrontational stares, and one begins to see a subtle feminist thread of meaning running through the artist’s painting for nearly two decades.

There are other ways that this feminist project manifests. Tagging, that building block of street art and graffiti that bedecks buildings and lonely urban corners around the world, is also an avowedly masculine visual language. It seems to speak, at best, of male street artists one-upping one another in friendly rivalry, while at worst it’s a system for demarcating gang or criminal territories. In both cases, it serves as an aggressive way to mark presence, and maybe to warn rivals. Liversage’s use of tagging morphs it into something quite different. It becomes a glyph, a fragment of a larger story about contemporary life. Also, it’s an invitation to decode and deconstruct fixed identities and gender roles. By appropriating this form of mark-making from the male-dominated graffiti/street art subculture, the female artist surely pushes against the notion that any artistic language can be owned by a single gender. And by thoroughly exploding the colour palette from the blacks and reds that tend to prevail in tagging, she touches on a fascinating side-alley in the contemporary reconsiderations of some aspects of art history.

Writer and artist David Batchelor speculated in his 2000 book ‘Chromophobia’ that trends in art and architecture in the 20th Century, most notably Bauhaus-style modernism and, later, Minimalism, relegated colour to second-class status. Expressive colour, he theorized, had come to be considered less pure, more superficial, and crucially, more feminine than ‘serious’ culture allowed for. In a parallel sense, Liversage’s work challenges graffiti’s default to a narrow pallete, playing off startling fuchsias and corals against deep turquoises and sky blues. In fact, it is Liversage’s instinct for colour that is contemporary but never saccharine, that activates her work.

In recent years, the artist has broadened her output to include numerous still life paintings, specifically floral arrangements. One such work from 2020 is called FLOWHER620(); this title makes it clear that these works aim to transcend mere decoration. In fact, this subsection of Liversage’s output is a stealthy means for challenging the women’s objectification. Why stealthy? The explosion in contemporary home and office spaces has resulted in acres of new walls to be adorned. Next to the large-scale portrait, decorative floral works must surely rank highly as palatable subject matter. Simply put, in a flower painting, a contemporary audience doesn’t see the critique or confrontation coming. But by presenting her floral displays as seething, dripping morasses of marks, Liversage does something quite different.

She suggests that contemporary femininity won’t stay put and shouldn’t be content to simply be on show. More than most works in this genre, even those by Vincent van Gogh, Liversage’s flower paintings seem alive and anthropomorphic.

 In FRISSON (2021), a centralized vase presents us with an unruly bouquet. Each flower is reduced to a set of essentialized shapes: dots, concentric circles and ovals, suggestions of spirals; many bordering on the anatomical. And yet, in the bottom third of this painting lies a key to the artist’s thinking. The hot pink that dominates the background has been applied so enthusiastically (resonating with the title of the work: Liversage reminded me that ‘frisson’ means a sudden strong feeling of excitement) that the spray paint drips down in uncontrolled beams, engulfing the institutional green of the tablecloth. In this part, as in much of her oeuvre, Liversage seems to urge her viewer to not only accept but revel in the gendering of colour. ‘If you’re going to teach me that pink is a girly colour’, the artist seems to say, ‘then I’m going to deploy that colour, and that girliness to upend your system and your comfort.’

Michael Smith is a Johannesburg based writer, teacher and artist. He has worked as Managing Editor of ArtThrob, and has been published in Art South Africa, The Mail&Guardian, The Art Times and Independent Education. He has written catalogue essays for Sanell Aggenbach, Connor Cullinan and Lyndi Sales, and he was commissioned to pen an essay for the book Brett Murray, published by Jacana Media and Goodman Gallery in 2013.