FANIE BUYS: So Called

Fanie Buys is a South African artist working with figuration and considering the role of traditional portraiture in contemporary society.  Using found images, AI, and unconventional subject matter: Buys considers the act of painting as a performative meditation to realize hidden, often tongue-in-cheek, meaning. Erudite, verbose, but always witty, Buys’ work is a developing practice considering himself as an artist juxtaposed against a critical disdain of people who put that in their artist’s statements.

This body of work has been the search for a figure. This figure is partly my own and partly my much-derided animus, which floats about a foot above my head at all times (sort of like a poltergeist, except it arranges furniture to maximize living space). Being gay is, despite what those finely chiseled Heartstopper boys will have you believe, quite an undertaking: and painting gay men even more so.

This figure sometimes inhabits the background of Sargent paintings, wades gently out to sea in Tuke’s works, and bravely hacks at briars through several Pre-Raphaelite tableaux. This body of work is a sincerely narcissistic consolidation of my own identity through modelling fey / au-fait males in a figurative tradition.

Thankfully I have yet to develop enough hubris to overtly create a self-portrait. The models for these works began as ideas, and as the oracle at Delphi chewed bay leaves, I manically typed short stories and love letters to neural networks to produce scenes derided from the most nefarious iteration of collective consciousness (Dall-E). Doing this is the marriage of my earlier work with found images and an evolving sense of how contemporary culture interacts with how we see ourselves in the media (in the broadest but most psychotically obtuse manner).