The Automatic Hand – Dakar, Senegal

The Folly of Nini  and Fanon.

These paintings were made in Ouakam, Dakar, Senegal. It’s where I’ve been living and working. A stone’s throw from the bay. If they have rules then only black charcoal for flesh and oil paint for drapery and the little ‘nature mortes’. The canvas is un-primed. For all their baroque irony there is still an honesty to the materials.

I work on both sides of the canvas. I draw in charcoal then reverse it and apply layers of vanish and paint that soak through and fix the charcoal on the other surface. When I reverse them back the initial drawing is half destroyed, the turps having bled into the charcoal. It softens it. It bleeds the edges of where drawing ends and painting begins. That is what gives the canvases their smokey character. It is also what introduces a healthy dose of chance into the process.

<p>If there is an artistic strategy then it is the implementation of bastardised classicism and irony on a subject that resists. A subject who’s resistance is born out of the fact that it cannot tell which of its wounds are actually self inflicted. The paintings don’t seek to challenge traditional artistic norms, instead they capitulate to those norms. And like the alcoholic in its surrender, they find their feedom. But it is the subject that always wins this game. In this they are maudlin paintings for maudlin times. In this I find them mystifying.

Ouakam, Dakar Studio View 2024

I think that’s a good sign, that I haven’t been granted access to their meaning. I think they are difficult to pry open. But they are not totally opaque, they have a tenderness that lets you in enough, that suspends you for a second. Then closes its access to meaning leaving you with just the retinal afterburn of an idea. Looking at the paintings now I see that vacant, dusty nebular quality that Dakar has. Its schizoid charm. Its narcissistic hubris caught in the reflection of its own reality. Of conceit and insecurity co-exiting, the tensions of it as a neurotic subject. The paintings are terribly in league with that which it abhors. Painting that might be deceitfully beautiful. But not as dishonest as the quotidian. A friend wrote to me recently of them: “These new paintings are inherently influenced by place, by West Africa; however, they are synthesised through the lens of Western European classical painting. This dialogue between two artistic contexts on the one hand serves as an ironic commentary on representation and identity. The comfort and familiarity of classical painting conventions, akin to Manet’s “The Balcony” and “The Railway”, represents a heritage that you draw upon, yet they also deconstruct the ways in which these traditions can marginalise or misrepresent black subjectivity.”

I’m surprised she wrote this – There is nothing comforting about either the “Balcony” or “The railway”. Nothing familiar, that’s kind of the strength of Manet. And for me, however tragic historically, the women’s subjectivity is solely grounded on the accidental level of melanin in the skin and nothing more. And the more melanin the more reflective the skin the more vividly chromatic it is as it reflects its surroundings. For the painter there is no black skin, just the luminosity of the light that is reflected. Rainbow mirrors. A skin able to capture “all the cosmic effluvia. Drops of sun under the earth. (Fanon). And yet I choose (out of expediency?) to render the myriad of colour in the carbonised black of charcoal.

They are crepuscular even though there is an absence of colour and light that suggests the time of day. But they are on the cusp both of day and night, and of land and sea. They are from what T.S. Eliot would call the “violet hour”. And as I walk the dog and dusk, over the cliffs and down onto Ouakam beach. Past the women gutting fishes down form the Mosque of the Divine, through the testosterone fug of the men working out. See in the huddles of commerce and trade the proto space technicians of tomorrow. Those Wakanda warriors in their market bought Puma’s. I have not worked from photographs, instead I am left with my memory. My time is taken up in this labour of memorising and imagining. I paint them later out of a mind half cocked. Everything deferred, everything at one point removed. Of dusk and the crepuscular. Of the coast and the cusp of land and sea.