Asha Zero

by Shane De Lange

I have known Asha for years and I still do not know his ‘real’ name – I only know his brand and the many identities he performs under. His work suggests that the Authentic can be equated with the inside and the notion of the One, and Imitation or Other are outside of that space. Zero, in this context, is the only cipher that can distinguish from, and give support to, the One. The many identities of Asha Zero – Palinki, Broop Nook, and Whatsnibble, to name a few – problematize the inner workings of an individuality-hyped, but mostly fragmented and sometimes indifferent, society. He distinguishes himself from this information based society, and gives support to those compatriots with similar goals.

I recently spoke about Asha Zero’s satirical work at an exhibition opening in the Graskop hotel gallery. This exhibition was coordinated by Abrie Fourie, and showcased works by Asha, Zakkie Eloff, and myself – a schizophrenic grouping at best. I was planning on delivering a rather formal speech, but after a tearjerker by Zakkie’s widow, René, I realized that the best course of action was to speak about Asha from a more personal stance, leaving the academic stuff for another time. My talk attracted more attention than I thought it would, after which I optimistically moved into a kind of question and answer session.

It was at this point that the mood changed because some spectators reacted negatively to Asha’s work, which often incorporates human features, such as eyes and lips, juxtaposed with blood-like red spray paint splatter, corporate logos, and catch phrases. This was perceived as sacrilege, a mutilation of the human form. Many also expressed concern about the depiction of females in Asha’s work, such as in Diskette (below). Asha’s work tends towards open-ended facets and double binds that include ambiguous gender roles and pluralistic identities – things many audiences still feel uncomfortable with.

Diskette, Acrylic on board

Asha and I have spent days waxing lyrical about Spectacular Culture, and how it has saturated the globe in a haze of electronic media that brings traditional notions of identity and autonomy into question. His work ironically pulls from capitalistic and consumerist institutions that invade our lived lives – advertising, tabloids, television dinners, game shows, music videos, cult films, poster and album cover art and soap opera’s. Asha simply accents the ludic nature of these media, in a funny and sometimes juvenile manner, supported by a refined arts sensibility and wit.

One element of Asha’s art that I find intriguing is his sense of composition and the way he places things within the portrait format of his paintings. He always makes his own frames and incorporates them as part of the artwork, so as not to imprison his compositions. He pieces together various materials and parts from a variety of sources - magazines, newspapers, stickers, posters - to construct ambiguous and considered, layered collages. When he is satisfied with this “layout as sketch,” he goes on to paint a replica of it; quite simply, he copies the collage, but into the most traditional of media. By juxtaposing the photo-realistic qualities of magazine gloss images with the cut-up and fragmented nature of collage, Asha draws on the power of pastiche to make the overall effect of the artwork cohere, all tied together with a brush. Trench Jello (below) he balances textured areas with flat color, detailed images with abstract spaces, and plays outline against gestural scribbles (silhouette vs. façade). By “painting collages,” which are constructed from imagery depicting or signifying consumer society, Asha accents the hyperreality and multiplicity he finds in his urban environment.

Trench Jello, Acrylic on board

But Asha’s facsimiles and elaborate collages constructed by counterfeit identities are not restricted to formulae. He is subtle in his choice of colors, often incorporating extensive areas of flat color, or utilizing pattern and repetition to compliment his intricate details. His palette mainly consists of mixed and subdued pastel and grey tones, but he enjoys contrasting these with bright red and stark black hues that straight from the tube, often incorporating gesture, in the form of expressive brushstrokes, random spray, and violent splatters. The pink in Diskette, for example, is fuzzy and the red is harsh, instilling a hyperbolic sense of harmony and aggression. The red drips into the pink to support the composition and create a balance between the positive textured spaces and the flat negative parts of the picture. He compliments this movement with a pattern of diagonal lime green lines that have a retro 80s feel to them. Asha often uses this euro-trash / electro-clash aesthetic with his mock subject.

Zandu Flinker, Acrylic on board

I see these as documents of an information age that is numbed by the schizophrenic sensory experience of city life. He pieces iterative, trans-media processes together in an attempt to negate the detection or reduction of his warped image of Self. Bogus identities are supported by bogus corporations - Roadkillvisiontoiletries and Mobilediscoetcetera –often used to publish drawings, hand-out booklets, and stickers, sometimes music and experimental sound, that further interrogate the anonymous, unpredictable and unknown factors of life, or manipulate established systems such as the art market and gallery space. Asha attempts to reveal the consequences and outcomes of modernity, globalization, and urbanization, using capitalist-consumer orientated tricks and fibs. Power and progress, falsity and imitation, stress and speed, growth and development – these binaries perturb, stimulate and catalyze, and the resultant anxieties are emphasized in Asha’s work.

Whatsnibble, Acrylic on board

Asha communicates a downloaded reality, in the midst of an over-heated consumerist society. He has a special affinity to what I affectionately call the “techno-organic space” of the city - the sporadic growth of the concrete and steel architecture that structures the city, and the media that virulently evolves within its confines. The simulated worlds he creates sit somewhere between the writings of George Orwell and Marshall McLuhan and his works are a wonderfully and purposefully naïve dissection of binaries, like authentic and inauthentic, and specific and unspecific. Asha’s work unthreads the impossibilities of the ‘new’ and the ‘post’, chipping away at what Western Capitalist Domination would have us believe, with the tip of his brush. Ultimately, Asha gives us back the frame of the screen, accentuating a kind of terminal identity, foregrounding its Ones and its Zeroes.

- Shane de Lange