The thrill of  discovery: A young photographer from Benin

I arrived in Johannesburg and it was cold and rainy. After an 15 hour flight I was wondering what in world got me to decide to come to South Africa at this time of the year for just one week going from city to city with no time in the African countryside. I sighed and climbed under the duvet of the cozy bed in the charming Bed and Breakfast . I figured a couple of hours of sleep would help change my frame of mind. Sleep and a quick immersion in the South African art scene at the Joburg Artfair got me out of my funk.

This was my second time at the Joburg Artfair. I had gone in 2009, its second year in existence, so I knew what to expect. It is a small fair, very manageable (what a relief from the mega art fairs), and you really feel that you can absorb the material you see. The gallerists have time to talk to you. In fact they are thrilled to see somebody coming from America, which is still a rare occurrence at this fair. You get introduced to the artists, you can ask all the questions you want and really get a feel of what’s going on. Furthermore, there was an expansive wine tasting bar, which conveyed a sense of conviviality and encouraged visitors to hang around and network.

I have to confess I had the best laugh in front of Ed Young’s sculptural piece My gallerist made me do it. No question, Ed Young is a funny guy! I am talking about the naked man hanging from a nail! I love a sense of humor and whenever an artist can remind me not to take life too seriously I am grateful.  It is true it was mostly women who were staring at the sculpture and taking pictures but it sold very well – it came in an edition of three and all sold quickly !  It was well crafted and realistic, down to the socks and the hair on the legs.  

I spend a good amount of time at David Krut Projects booth with its rich selection of prints.  There are always a lot of people at Krut especially when David is present. Warm, gregarious, generous, he welcomes you and immediately you find yourself drawn into a circle of local artists, printmakers, and gallerists.       William Kentridge has a star position at Krut. They have been collaborating for years on printing projects. Included were linocuts from Kentridge’s Universal Archive Project. Based on ink drawings of birds, cats, and coffee pots,  Kentridge with David Krut’s master printmakers made linocuts on pages of old dictionaries unraveling master texts in the process.

 Another star of David Krut’s artists stable is Diane Victor. I was totally impressed by the emphasis on draughtsmanship in her prints. Her technical skills are superb. The way she puts these skills at the service of her imagination makes her work truly compelling. The end product is provocative, intense, and often satirical.  

In a very different vein, Stephen Hobbs’s prints harness his fascination with the architecture  of urban spaces and present a geometric web of lines that are at times truncated, interrupted thereby conveying an experience of disjunction, which is so familiar to an urban environment. He has a broad artistic practice and he is increasingly involved in public art in Johannesburg. There is much more to say about Krut’s printing project so keep posted for a whole post on it.

At the Goodman gallery Brett Murray’s response to the huge public polemic that surrounded  his painting The Spear depicting President Jacob Zuma with exposed genitals this spring was to the point and illustrated the government’s way of handling dissent: suppression of freedom of expression. It elicited a torrent of twitter traffic.

Next to it was a dramatic piece by Liza Lou, a Los Angeles artist who has been living in Durban for several years and whose beaded sculptures and paintings are now made with the help of local township women. The more I stood back from the piece the more its architectural qualities emerged. I met her later on in Durban. She took us to her studio where the township women were working on a new gorgeous piece made of beaded black, gold, and bright blue patches. These patches are ordered by Liza Lou, made by the women in the townships and assembled in the studio according to a design created by the artist.  Instead of paints, Liza Lou uses beads as her medium of choice. She works very meticulously choosing her colors just like she would use paint except that these beads are either glued or sown together by the township women under Liza Lou’s guidance. Beautiful work gets done while these women now have a sustainable life style. Bravo Liza!

I was very pleased to see that Kudzanai Chiurai was the winner of FNB Art Prize. I got to meet him and he is delightful. More to the point his work has a rawness, which coupled more recently with a tenderness for his environment makes it compelling.  He is an artist to watch for sure. See my remarks on his work at Documenta.

The featured artist, Deborah Poynton, had an installation of 11 paintings entitled Arcadia displayed in a dark room creating an all enveloping environment, the equivalent of a secret garden.

Her gallery, Michael Stevenson, seemed to be challenging the normal fair display format when it included the massive sculpture made from a found petrol tank by Michael Magarry, which was awkwardly stuck in a corner.   I did not like it so much but was more enthusiastic about his work once I saw some of his smaller pieces in their gallery in Cape Town. I would have preferred to see those at the fair.

The AOP gallery had a lovely selection of works on paper. I particularly noticed the work of Richard Penn and the beautifully displayed and exquisite book by Colin Richard. That sold right away.

I started years ago to collect works on paper so I still have a soft spot for them . Dan Halter‘s Things FAll Apart, (The entire text of Chinua Achebe’s) at once text and sculptural object was particularly poetic.

I  met Garth Rooke who had commissioned for his booth ten artists to create designs for full sized surfboards (Pipeline Guns) around the theme of Delftware and executed by renowned surfboard maker Spider Murphy.  Surfing is a very popular sport for those who live near Cape Town. Garth is bursting with projects and a force onto himself. Check out his roster of artists and  this cool site on his Delft project.

Few foreign galleries were present which was a shame.  However, Jack Bell a young gallerist from London was there with a solo show of a very talented artist/photographer from Benin, Leonce Raphael Agbodjelou. I took immediately a fancy to his work. At first I favored his earlier pieces of 2010, which showed portraits of Egungun masqueraders.  These were a more contemporary version of a traditional approach to portrait photography with a special sensitivity to color. However, it was his latest series “ Les Demoiselles de Porto Novo’ which is part of an ongoing portraiture project entitled “Citizens of Porto Novo” that won me over totally.More conceptual, formally complex and structured and more provocative, they tell a visual narrative of Africa and its colonization. The triptych presents a formal symmetry that shields at first glance the complexity of the narrative. It is through closer reading that this complexity becomes apparent. The photos are taken in an old colonial house built in Porto Novo in 1890 by the artist’s grandfather, a merchant who made his fortune selling lemonade to the French and Portuguese armies.  Porto Novo is the capital of Benin and was a major port for the slave trade. While the juxtaposition of the partially naked woman with the colonial architecture highlights to me the erotic appeal that the local black female body had to colonial eyes, the faded grandeur conveys also nostalgia for times gone by, for traditions slipping away perhaps. Being bare breasted was an aspect of traditional dressing for women in villages and the ceremonial Egungun mask point to traditional belief systems.  This work is at once personal and political and it is the layering of both that give depth to its aesthetic appeal. If asked whose work I was most enthusiastic about at the fair, I would choose the Demoiselles de Porto Novo. He is the discovery!

A booth held by the Museum of Modern Art from Equator Guinea was the only other space that showed West African artists. While it is unclear to me what this “Museum of Modern art “ is and who funds it (investors from what I understand) some of the works were intriguing. I liked this tapestry hanging by Placido Guimaraes.

France had a substantial presence at this fair being a partner in the context of the French South Africa season. Three galleries participated and the Maison Rouge Fondation Antoine Galbet sponsored Anthony McCalls’ light installation. A panel around the subject of Hybridization included Orlan, the performance artist who uses her body to address issues of shifting and ambiguous identity, and several French art critics and writers such as Melanie Bouteloup who participated in the curating of the Palais de Tokyo Triennale in Paris. This panel came as a surprise to me and I felt I was at the right place at the right time having seen the Triennale in Paris just a few weeks before .