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GALLERIES: Where Proust goes gaga over Gauguin

Saturday December 09 2017
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Tapestry, by Fitsum. PHOTO | FRANK WHALLEY

By FRANK WHALLEY

One of the region’s best-known painters is having a Gauguin moment.

And like Gauguin, he travelled from his homeland to seek inspiration in a foreign land.

For Fitsum Behre Woldelibanos, who came from Eritrea to live and work in Kenya has modified his usual painterly approach for a more illustrative style in which bold outlines define his subjects against interlocking planes of saturated colour.

Fitsum’s latest paintings accentuate his strong sense of design while presenting subtle statements of regret at the erosion of our environmental heritage — expressed, again like Gauguin, through a determination to look beyond classical and Renaissance sources.

Gauguin celebrated the freedoms of life in the South Seas, while Fitsum turns instead to homegrown, African cultural icons.

This is seen most clearly in his painting Venus of Samburu, in which a semi-naked young woman lies on a grassy slope overlooking a rolling northern landscape.

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As in Gauguin’s Nevermore, a painting of a naked Tahitian girl lolling on a bed, Fitsum dramatically emphasises the hip of his Venus which echoes the swell of the hills beyond.

Almost there but the painting appears hurried, for unlike the Gauguin, the head of Venus is curiously misplaced on her shoulders (too high and awkwardly angled) while the hand and arm that support it are more tree trunk than flesh and bone.

Nonetheless, Venus is one of the highlights of Fitsum’s current show of 25 paintings at the Tribal Gallery, a house on Loresho Ridge, Nairobi, (until next Saturday) where work is shown in a domestic setting. There, she stares rather disdainfully at furniture made from old dhows and the other tribal pieces in which this gallery specialises.

The star of the show, however, has little if anything at all to do with the Parisian stockbroker who gave it all up to paint lovely young maidens in the sun. (Well, wouldn’t you?)

That honour goes to a painting made on wooden bits and pieces reclaimed from demolished houses and glued together into three rough rectangles… less Gauguin and more another exile, El Tayeb Dawelbeit, a Sudanese artist based in Nairobi who coincidentally shows regularly at this gallery.

Its title, Creating a Tapestry of Identity over Memories of the Past, is a perfect Proustian fit for a work that promotes the theme of this exhibition, Urban Camouflage; which the artist says is, “an exploration of our beliefs and the influence of the contemporary (urban) landscape on our socio-political environment.”

It’s a bit of a mouthful but it comes down to asking how our surroundings affect us, while regretting the destruction of so much that we cared about.

And although the exhibition does not provide clear answers, at least by asking the question the artist invites us to consider the matter.

Executed with some of his old painterly panache, Tapestry shows three ghostly figures wandering among their lost past. It is an elegy for what has vanished, for our relentless progress that leaves nothing of value; it represents what little could be salvaged and treasured if only as a fleeting memory of what was lost.

The paintings each have formal integrity and while they are also the hinge for the artist’s polemic they stand too as decorative pieces that hold their own on the wall.

In works notable for their thin washes of pigment — occasionally more stains than statements — their energy stems from a vigorous attack that sees a loaded brush allowing the slashes and arabesques left to drip and meld with other elements of the compositions, stitching them into a harmonious whole.

Typical is The Drifter, which conveys the idea of a man carried along on a sea of possibilities.

And if you want to see how well this artist can handle composition, look no further than Purple Cow and note the perfect placement of the cow in the background against the single figure on its yellow ground.

Another clever arrangement — as smart in its simplicity —is George All Imported — a young man with a branded baseball cap and a shirt that proclaims he loves Jesus… the secular and the spiritual given equal weight in a strike against blatant commercialism. It is the patch of cloth hung behind the head, balancing the dark block of the T-shirt, that makes the picture so unusual and compelling.

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George All Imported, by Fitsum. PHOTO | FRANK WHALLEY

This is an artist with a sharp eye, even if it does sometimes mean that he himself heads off towards a commercially safe solution.

Elsewhere Fitsum offers little clusters of works built around refrains of regret… Clinging to Earth, sleeping or dead figures lying before ruined landscapes; Invisible Humans described as Men of the Forgotten World; and in a particularly Gauguinesque moment, a group called Ex-Worshipped Object that relates to the masks and figures that enrich African culture.

Here and elsewhere (notably at the Sankara in his current two-hander with Sane Wadu) the artist is now looking within this continent — and, as Gauguin found fulfilment in Oceana, so Fitsum has discovered a cause amid the wealth of his African roots.

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