Insight into my recent London trip with a special crush on the Saatchi Gallery current exhibition:
PANGAEA II:
NEW ART FROM AFRICA AND LATIN AMERICA
11 MARCH 2015 - 6 SEPTEMBER 2015
EPHREM SOLOMON - ETHIOPIA
Ephrem Solomon portrays the distance between the governing and the governed, fleshing out tender subjects whose lives are marked by a lack of political agency and meaning. Solomon’s mixed media layering of human experience in his native Ethiopia are descriptive images of everyday life, that which is neither extraordinary nor uncommon. However, these seemingly mundane objects such as the artists’ signature chair and slippers are in fact catalysts in the elaboration of a broader political story. Unpacking the artist’s anecdotal imaginings, the emergence and reemergence of Solomon’s ‘Untitled’ characters, solemn-looking men and women, allude to the negotiation of will in the face of immobility and oppression. Suddenly, the chairs, slippers, and paper clippings become the characters of a personal narrative, recurring in meaningful ways as if torn from the pages of the artist’s own diary.
Born in 1983, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Lives and works in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
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ALIDA CERVANTES - MEXICO
EDUARDO BERLINER
Eduardo Berliner had originally resisted using oil on canvas because of its weighted tradition, loaded with social, political and cultural associations. Eventually he came to recognise that the medium’s resilience lay in a unique temporality, unlike the uninterrupted flow of photographic images that populate the modern world. Berliner utilises this tension between painting and the image to question the authenticity of memory and direct experience. The artist’s primordial relationship to the physical world alters his perceptions of daily surroundings, allowing his paintings to become manifestations of tacit assumptions and misunderstandings. Berliner’s humanistic renderings of living things, scenes from the natural world, plant forms, animals and people, revealed shared relationships contingent on unlikely occurrences. They attest to the slippage between invention and memory, between indifference and trauma.
Born in 1978, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
ALINA CERVANTES
Alida Cervantes’ paintings reimagine the perceived boundaries upon which social, economic, and political conditions remain contingent. Raised in the border city of Tijuana, Mexico, the artist’s home environment instilled from an early age a sense of Mexico’s hierarchical binaries of race, class and culture. Cervantes’ vivid historical paintings mask a reality in which social and political disparities play out on two levels, both within the intimate social structures of the artist’s home life and in the actuality of the political border that constitutes an impenetrable threshold for many Mexican citizens. The city of Tijuana provides the springboard into a painterly investigation of the actions, relationships and perceptions of Mexico’s cross-cultural and multi-ethnic society.
Born in 1972, San Diego, CA
Lives and works in Tijuana, Mexico
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(All photos by myself)
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Part of the Gallery was closed this weekend, but you can see and learn more about the brilliant artists exposed here:
http://www.saatchigallery.com/artists/pangaea_II/
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