Notes

Robert Hodgins’s theatrical and minimalist, A Little Light Class Conflict, is painted in a striking array of deep, bright and more muted blues set against a stark white background. It engages with a familiar subject matter: the age-old conflict between blue collar workers and industrialists, portrayed here as two somewhat ridiculous characters imbued with Hodgins’s unmistakable wry sense of humour.

He not only portrays a balding white male occupying a place of undue authority as avaricious and self-important, but diminishes him by placing him with his large round flabby face at the bottom right hand corner of the picture plane. He is portrayed as at once truculent and oddly vulnerable. As Brenda Atkinson so succinctly writes, ‘Hodgins loves the armoury of the suit, its apparently impregnable defence of the soft flesh underneath – the concealment of the flaccid by the virile’.¹

Looming large and dominating the painting is a blue-collar worker hanging on to a bright red overhead beam. He insults the boss with the words ‘fat, smug capitalist bastard’. The unconvincing retort ‘Bug Awf!’ penned in red is both conceited and pitiable. Atkinson remarks that ‘Robert Hodgins knows that image and text function powerfully as mutually invested entities’ and here Hodgins’s artful use of word and image results in a humorous and comical interrogation of A Little Light Class Conflict.²

1. Brenda Atkinson (2002) ‘New Loves, Old Affairs’ in Brenda Atkinson, Robert Hodgins, Cape Town: Tafelberg, pages 14/15.

2. Ibid, page 14.