Playing Mas brings together the work of four contemporary artists who have a shared interest in the potency and power of carnival and masquerade to engender creativity and emancipation of the self. Their work will be shown alongside a small early Masquerade painting from 1940 by the Nigerian Master Ben Enwonwu depicting Masqueraders in Nigeria.
Caroline Achaintre
Caroline Achaintre initially started making tufted Masks as a way to translate her drawings into real space. Achaintre tufts each individual piece of yarn into a woven canvas base, a process which produces a painterly expressionistic image, the natural fabric and organic rendering suggesting something primitive and ancient, a duplicitous space where reality and fantasy converge and where there is space for non linear change and experimentation. The myriad influences from European carnival and sources as diverse as early Arabic sculpture, trigger references but remain in the end undefined and on the edge of recognition, which is where she wants them to be.
Though Achaintre’s process is to an extent technical in its realization, she did not train in textiles and thus enjoys a very individual and experimental approach to the use of the medium. Tufting the wool from behind the canvas, with a tufting gun, her compositions are developed largely through intuition. Moustache-Eagle one of the works in the show has a mystical quality: -both a man and a bird in a state of transition. Its rich colours deliver an exotic plumage that’s simultaneously seductive and ominous.
Achaintres work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Baltic and TATE Britain as well as Castello do Rivoli Museo D’ Arte Contemporanea.
Daniel Crews-Chubb
Focusing primarily on the nude, Crews-Chubb uses historical parallels to explore both abstract and figurative mark-making; identifying imagery that repeats historically and anthropologically from antiquity to the present day. His bold and vibrant works employ a traditional, expressionistic, painterly language, which wrestles with his primary influences – tribal art, ancient rituals, social media and amateur anthropology. The works embody a search for the authentic, the raw and the unrefined, subtly influenced by the repetitive nature of image-led, consumer culture, Modernist painting, and the history of mark-making from cave painting through to neo-expressionism. His work has a playful quality where any way of applying paint and anything subject goes, allowing himself the freedom to play with mark making and historical source material.
“I’m like a sponge taking in everything I love about painting and feeding it into my work. It’s obvious that I am fascinated by the nude and its place in art history. Picasso, Baselitz, Jorn and De Kooning are all major influences, but in the end the female form has been a conduit or enabler for playing with abstract mark-making and paint. The latest works involve an exploration of how images can be abstracted through time, through record and wear and tear”
Crews- Chubb’s work has recently been acquired by Denver Art Museum and he has shown internationally from Miami, New York and Denver to Istanbul and London.
Ben Enwonwu
Benedict Enwonwu is one of the most important African artists of the 2oth century. Born in 1917 and educated in both fine art and anthropology he attended Government Colleges in Nigeria from 1934–3, moving onto Goldsmith College, London, in 1944, Continuing his studies at Ruskin College, from 1944 to 1946, he then attended the Ashmolean College and Slade School of Fine Arts, Oxford, from 1946–48, graduating with first-class honours. Like other greats of the 20th Century such as El-Salahi he was able to fuse an understanding of his own and his adopted cultures, creating works as varied as masqueraders, he was also commissioned to sculpt the queen in 1954.
Enwonwu held exhibitions of his work across the world from London to Lagos, Milan, New York Washington DC and Boston. His work has continued to be exhibited widely including at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town. Works by the artist have been placed in numerous global institutional collections including the permanent collection of the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC.
The small work we are exhibiting came into the show by chance found at auction literally weeks before the show and included at the last minute as if destined. It represents an artist looking back to his local heritage at the sculptural nature of masquerade in 1940 when the world was experiencing seismic changes in technology, politics and travel. It is an intoxicating painting born of his innate interest in anthropology and understanding of sculptural form.
Che Lovelace
Che Lovelace lives and works in Port of Spain, Trinidad. He received his training at l’Ecole ReÌgionale des Beaux-Arts de la Martinique and is a founder and director of CLAY J’ouvert, a traditional Carnival outfit based in Woodbrook, Port of Spain. In 2003, he co-founded the alternative cinema space Studiofilmclub with fellow artist Peter Doig and is currently a lecturer at the University of the West Indies Creative Arts Campus. His practice increasingly includes elements of performance his own and others, which he absorbs into his painting process. The paintings we are showing date back to 2006, which seemed to be a key year for Lovelace. They depict carnivalesque characters in a post carnival in between state of being. Pouter shows a typically Trinidadian character in costume, in play in another space other than that of the everyday. Resplendent in his plumage he also has the sense of a moment of stillness after many hours of noise, action and visual extravaganza.
Zak Ové
British-Trinidadian artist Zak Ové presents three works in Playing Mas; one from his celebrated Doily Painting series and the other a proof from his Invisible Man installation which first debuted at Somerset House and is currently on show at Yorkshire Sculpture Park as part of their 40th Anniversary celebrations. In addition we have one of his most important sculptures from 2009 of a time travelling Nubian Princess which has been exhibited from Berlin to London and from Dakar to New York.
Black and Blue: The Invisible Man and the Masque of Blackness, is a mass of 80 identical two-metre-tall graphite figures, a striking statement currently on show at YSP within the Park’s 18th century landscape. Powerful and totemic, the impact of the group is amplified through their repeated forms, facing forward to confront the viewer en masse.
The installation built on Ové’s 2016 project for the 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair, which saw 40 figures sited in the courtyard of London’s Somerset House. In this location, the installation directly referenced Ben Jonson’s play The Masque of Blackness, which was enacted by Anne of Denmark and members of her court at Somerset House in 1605. Featuring white actors in blackface, the play was reflective of the societal shift towards a preference for lighter skin in the early 17th century. Ové also alludes to Ralph Ellison’s acclaimed novel The Invisible Man, a pioneering consideration of racism and marginalised communities in America told through the eyes of its black protagonist.
For these works Ové uses graphite to explore what he describes as “future world black”. The artist is constantly seeking ways to express recognisable, traditional African forms, exploring the sculptural possibilities of more contemporary materials, such as plastic, resin and graphite. The form of the figure on which Black and Blue: The Invisible Man and the Masque of Blackness is based is a small dark wood sculpture given to him as a child by his father, acclaimed filmmaker Horace Ové, in the 1970s. The way in which the original sculpture has travelled across land and time, has been adapted and re-shaped, thereby acquiring new layers of meaning, is a metaphor for the complexities of contemporary identity. Although the gesture is taken from a traditional, existing form, the raised hands resonate with and reference current tensions and the Black Lives Matter protest movement.
Ové also draws inspiration from Trinidad carnival, a tradition started by French immigrants in the 18th century as an elaborate masquerade ball and later influenced by the transatlantic slave trade. African slaves used masks and developed Calypso music to mock their masters and communicate between themselves. After the emancipation of the British West Indies in 1833, freed slaves took over the streets at carnival time, using song, dance and masquerade as a symbol of freedom and defiance. Carnival has evolved to become a national festival and is celebrated on the island every year before Lent in February or March.
In 2015, Ové became the first Caribbean artist to be commissioned by the British Museum, with his pair of seven-metre high Moko Jumbie sculptures exhibited in the Great Court as part of the Celebrating Africa exhibition before being permanently installed in their Africa gallery in March 2017. Zak Ové’s DP series of wall based knitted collages are an extension of his installation in the Grand Court of the British Museum in 2015 where a Moko Jumby’s head was fashioned from hand stitched doilies sourced online and in flea markets. Key figures in Trinidadian carnival since the beginning of the 20th Century, the Moko Jumbies are guardian sentinels and godlike seekers looking out for danger, mapping out the surroundings. They were installed earlier this year in the British Museum’s Africa Galleries.
The DP paintings work for Ové as an African grid system of mainly concentric oscillating openwork layered circles; a less defined, less rigid, emancipated, less austere, and more creative version of the traditional grid. The Yoruba tribe of Nigeria of which ancestry many Trinidadians can lay claim believed in the concept of time travel and this features heavily in Ové’s work, most notably in his installation at Glasstress at the Venice Biennale in 2014 of his time machine, a series of concentric oscillating clocks. The notion of travelling along time lines linking ancient ancestry to modern carnival and play appeals very much to the artist’s sensibility in the DP series.
Ové works between sculpture, film, painting and photography, often collaging the various elements using found, cast and recovered materials. Interested in reinterpreting lost culture and mythology using modern and antique materials, he pays tribute to both spiritual and artistic African and Trinidadian identities which have been given new meanings through Trinidadian carnival and the cross cultural dispersion of ideas.
Of continual interest is the emancipation of personal existence through incarnation with an ‘other self’, showing us the power of play to free an individual from the contained experience of one’s identity. The creation of Doilies generally by older women is one such creative outlet utilized on a cultural scale by Trinidadians. Thought of by him as an expression of individuality but linked by a commonality Doily making is a hobby for many gifted amateurs who us them decoratively in the home and which were a sign from the fifties onwards of upwards social mobility. In addition to their decorative and creative craft based function doilies also act to protect furnishings from damage linking to the Moko Jumby role as protector.
Growing up with a Trinidadian father and Irish mother and living sporadically between the Trinidad and London, Doilies have an nostalgic trigger for Ové, harking back to his family store of Brickabrack and Antiques. Notably with this series he too enjoys the power of play being liberated to experiment with colour and form in a wall based format, hereto not within his sculptural vocabulary.
Carnival in Trinidad began as a predominantly elite event. In the late 1700s French immigrants arrived on the island to run plantations, bringing with them enslaved Africans. The plantation owners staged elaborate masquerade balls during the carnival season. Africans also brought their own masking traditions of which the Moko Jumbie is but one. Masking for Africans in the Caribbean was a way to connect to ancestors and nature as well as ideas of ‘home’. But traditional masquerades were also used to satirically depict their masters and turn a critical eye on plantation society. After full emancipation in 1838, Africans took over the streets at carnival time, using song, dance and masquerade to re-dress the still existing social inequalities.
Thus all four contemporary artists use the carnivalesque in different ways to inspire their work. What they share is a sense of creative freedom and infinite possibility, which makes their work direct and dynamic whilst retaining a sense of mystery and fun. As Derrick Adams recently said in a talk at Pioneer Works in Redhook New York “ Life is a collage”. These artists are taking like magpies and giving much more, Playing Mas to conjure unique and evocative imagery.
Special thanks to Christian at Arcade Gallery and Caroline Achaintre for enabling her participation in the show.
