there: look: up there: the stars 

The secret powers of the quiet sublime: how a digital billboard project taps into 18th century aesthetics and something even older. 

Developed in the mid 18th century, Edmund Burke’s theory of the sublime in art defines it as that which evokes a greatness beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement, or imitation. Turner’s dramatic sea storms fit this bill or works of art that inspire awe and wonder, dread and terror. However, there’s another aspect to the sublime, one that comes from a different understanding and encompasses an alternative but equally heightened response: that of the imagination’s move towards the infinite. Drawing from what Immanuel Kant called the mathematical sublime, this is a quieter but no less intense response, less of the formless turbulence and more of the calm awe felt from the immensity and beauty of the natural world. 

Consider Bonco’s Virgo in Red and Purple as an example of the Kantian mathematical Sublime. Across the pictorial plane straight lines divide its surface into a grid, then form a number of triangles decreasing in size. Black, ivory, and white are joined by hints of bright colour and the surface of an unprimed canvas showing through. The composition is iterative, elegant, and contained. This isn’t the moment of visceral drama, but a chess-board like play of quiet geometry and signifiers. The work isn’t sterile, however, there are no precisely masked and painted lines or brushless perfection. The hand of the artist is evident here. Following the triangles picked out in deep red reveals the constellation Virgo and the painting references the Book of Genesis and its account of the creation of the world and early history of humanity. 

In Genesis 15:5 God takes the doubting Abraham outside and directs him to look upward and count the stars, if indeed he can count them all. Confronted with the vastness of the night sky and its countless stars we sense something thrilling and overwhelming, an ineffable force. Both enormous in its complexity and unfathomable in its magnitude the cosmos reminds us of our place in the universe. We are just a tiny fraction of something vast and sublime or, as Nobel prize winner Jacques Monod would have it, “Gypsies at the edge of the universe”. Life, like the cosmos, can overwhelm our capacity to make sense of it.

In an existence seemingly shaped equally by predictability and randomness, humankind is drawn to that which we cannot fully comprehend and to follow a restless impulse towards the sublime.

Since the beginning of time and across all cultures we have charted the night sky in mythopoetic terms, a response to this vast and unknowable domain. The night sky is mysterious, infinite, beautiful. Yet its contemplation makes insignificant our individual fates and crushes delusions of self-importance. 

Vastly enlarged and appearing on digital billboards across Auckland and other New Zealand cities, a detail of Virgo in Red and Purple assumes the monumental proportions of its structure.

To see the billboard, the viewer mimics Abraham’s action of looking up.  Where once humans looked to the stars for guidance now marketing shapes our decisions, but substituting Bonco’s painting on this platform offers a disturbance to this landscape, his work returning the feeling of standing alone in front of infinity.

At odds with the large scale and public visibility of the billboards is Bonco’s approach to his practice. For him painting is an introspective pursuit, a practice of self discovery. Central to the human condition is the need to explore our sense of place and purpose in the world and this inward-facing reflection is common in Bonco’s work. His practice is deeply personal, about asking questions and uncovering truths, a “slow, meditative process to know ourselves in a truer sense”.

Much of Bonco’s painting invokes the metaphysical and extends back into the tradition of abstraction and spirituality explored by Mondrian, Kandinsky, and Hilma af Klint. The origins of Western abstraction owe much to a confluence of ideas about spirituality current at the turn of the last century and shaped a radically new paradigm for art. Via the language of geometric abstraction his work encompasses references to art historical and spiritual concerns, filtered through his own life experiences and beliefs. Encoded within Virgo in Red and Purple are signs and symbols, a characteristic of Bonco’s practice. Triggers for the subconscious, these elements communicate between artist and viewer, seeking to offer a balm of sorts. Now presented in the public domain, the painting’s symbolic elements are writ large – presented on LED digital billboards along busy streets. The painting’s quiet signifiers have quite literally become signs for our time.

Written by Kelly Carmichael

Commissioned for Bonco’s 2021 Art Ache digital billboard campaign.
Billboard campaign commissioned by LUMO digital and Art Ache.

Cover Art: Bonco, 5:15. New North Road, Kingsland. 2021. Photo by Paul Nathan