Fode Camara: Many Colors, Much Meaning.

Contemporary African Art Gallery New York, New York April 18-October 15, 2001

Art enthusiasts will certainly remember Senegalese artist Fode Camara's stunning paintings from such exhibitions as "Africa Explores" and "Revolution Francaise sous les Tropiques' in the late 1980s and early 1990s. While Camara has shown widely in Europe and Africa since that time, this exhibition at New York's Contemporary African Art Gallery marked his first solo show at an American venue. Gallery owner Bill Karg, a long-time admirer of Camara's work, selected ten recent acrylic-on-canvas pieces both for their compelling beauty and the set of social issues they address. Even with the gallery's relatively modest space, the paintings were adequately lit and thoughtfully arranged according to theme, color, and composition.

Without a doubt, the colorful virtuoso painting for which Camara is so well known has become increasingly robust, expressive, and intense in the last decade. The artist's expertise in painting, interior design, and decoration synthesizes in the exhibited pieces. Compared with his earlier work, these recent canvases are more intensive explorations of the formal elements of painting and interior design, especially space, color, and volume. While his works are tightly composed with strong, vertical axes, his compositions challenge conventional spatial schemes. Camara engages the canvas as a particular kind of space in which background and foreground are deconstructed and rearticulated as converging planes, ambiguous tracts, and swirling bands of bold color. Indeed, as the artist himself has explained, his practice is concerned with "the act of doing and exploring the possibilities of technique" (taped interview with the author, June 4, 1999). Camara rarely paints on an easel, preferring instead to move his canvas to the floor, where he interacts with it, taking into account and reacting to each preceding gesture in the development of his composition. In this, the canvas is both the support for representation and a space to explore the performative aspects of painting. The gestural quality of his production is best exemplified by Goree Study VI, whose ribbons of color seemingly record several uninterrupted brushstrokes.

Although Camara's concern for the practice of painting may prompt parallels with the Abstract Expressionists, any such comparison operates only tenuously. His recent works continue the thematic exploration he initiated in the late 1980s. In particular, he grapples with a range of issues related to border crossing, colonial history and postcolonial memory, and the complexities of contemporary identity. Goree island, infamous for its coral-colored slave fortress, serves as a point of critical departure in several works. In contrast to previous large-scale paintings in which the artist depicted the fortress's architectural elements, these recent works interrogate the island as a site for passage and movement. In Goree Study V, Goree Study VI, Goree Memorial in Torsion, and Movement VI (Fig. 1), Camara combines fluid, swirling bands with curvilinear and angular tracts of burnt sienna, electric blue, lime green, and magenta. The resulting works appear as dramatic explosions of volume and color that evoke the powerful, turbulent waves of the Atlantic Ocean. On this note, it might have been beneficial to include a few of the artist's recent modular, design-oriented constructions of wood and paint. They would have complemented the canvases while highlighting the new direction of Camara's work.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The largest painting in the exhibition, Acculturation II (Fig. 2), served as the show's centerpiece, occupying the most prominent position in the gallery. Acculturation II is part of a series of life-size male nudes and semi-nudes begun in the mid-1990s that deals with the relationship of the individual to society. As the title suggests, this particular painting poses questions about the shifts in personal identity that accompany border crossing and migration. For the artist, who completed training at the Institut National des Arts du Senegal and then moved to Paris to study at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Arts Decoratifs, this series is implicitly autobiographical. Having since returned to his native Dakar, Camara is reflective about his movements between France and Senegal. These passages and transitions compelled him to confront anonymity, alienation, and assimilation.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

Of the works in this series, Acculturation II is perhaps most exemplary of Camara's self-described "abstract-figurative style." Whereas other paintings in this group clearly portray the male form (which in some cases closely resembles the artist), the figure here appears as a silhouette composed of brightly hued, expressionistic patches that begin to converge with a background of multiple colored zones. The nearly life-size figure faces the viewer, but his modesty or even humility is suggested by the act of covering his face with a rectangular plaque. The plaque is an essential element throughout the series. It variously conceals the face or genitals, reflects an image outside the painting's frame, or records a Wolof proverb. Unlike other works in this group, Acculturation II is intentionally ambiguous, for the figure's face is concealed and the artist omits any text to guide the viewer's interpretation.

On the whole, this exhibition offered an excellent sampling of Fode Camara's recent work. It did much more than celebrate beauty and skill in a time when little contemporary art is concerned with the beautiful. This ensemble of works also drew attention to the practice of an artist who lives and works in a major African metropole. The artist's relation to Dakar is significant, for his practice has been informed by and connected to the city's artistic and conceptual landscape since the earliest days of his career. Camara continues to be an energetic and driving force there, participating consistently in Dakar-based exhibitions and workshops. In this respect, the exhibition offered an entree to Dakar's thriving art scene and represented one of its most respected practitioners.

JOANNA GRABSKI is Assistant Professor of Art at Denison University. She recently completed her dissertation, on contemporary Senegalese artists and art, at Indiana University.