Bastiaan Van Stenis is a South African artist whose practice centres on painting, alongside sculpture and assemblage. His composite works incorporate found materials, natural detritus, and taxidermy from animals found deceased. Largely self-taught, Van Stenis has developed his practice through sustained experimentation, research, and direct engagement with materials. In 2025, Van Stenis presented his first solo exhibition with SMAC Gallery titled Untimeous. Recent solo exhibitions include Bless Bridges at Kalashnikov Gallery, Johannesburg (2024); Fields and Feelds and Fields of Faddism at Rust en Vrede Gallery, Cape Town (2023); and Wake You Gently Singing at World Art Gallery, Cape Town (2019).

In Van Stenis’ latest body of work, commonly overlooked materials and unresolved figures gain protagonism as stories are teased to viewers. There is only so much the artist reveals and allows others to see, offering clues in painting titles and leaving the rest up to interpretation. His oil painting Death by moonshine (2025), for instance, depicts the solitude of a Mars-like landscape where a figure wrapped in what appears to be a blanket is lying down. The title plays with the dual meaning of “moonshine” as both homemade liquor and lunar light, and although moonshine liquor can be deadly and moonlight obviously cannot, it is in that meaning-making ambiguity that the artist’s humorous framing succeeds. Similarly, in the mixed-media piece The greatest velvet meatball landing (2025), the ambition and seriousness of imperial space exploration are overshadowed by the materiality mentioned in the artwork’s title. We are not speculating about a high-tech spaceship, nor are we embedded in the Cold War space race, but instead we find ourselves admiring the absurdity of a velvet meatball landing on another planet.

There are other scenes too: the outline of a kiss with a backdrop of a piano, gatherings of animals and ghostly figures, and a group of interstellar travellers’ farewell. One of the works, however, is set in a landscape that is less evidently galactic: of a half lady-like, half undefinable creature titled Carry on edges and remember not to press (2026). The work features a woman, distinguishing it from the other artworks where figures cannot be clearly identified by gender, and thus signalling a different attention placed by the artist for the character.

Bárbara Rousseaux

Images and text courtesy of SMAC Gallery