The Black Ghost

Primo Marella Gallery is pleased to present the group exhibition THE BLACK GHOST.

The Black Ghost exhibition aims at highlighting the innovative and strong attitude of the most interesting African artists of the new generation to paint towards a new figurative direction, where the characters – mainly black people - become the real protagonists of short stories, involved in extraneous circumstances and visions.

The power of storytelling through portraiture turns into a vehicle for interrogating ideas of cultural heritage and identity.

Most of the times, characters are depicted as flat shapes, with little width, thin lines, almost as they were emptied bodies. If it wasn’t for the presence of human traits, i.e. eyes, nose and lips, they would be pure shadows.

Sometimes these artists self-portray, sometimes they represent real people they know, some other times they paint just imaginary characters. In any case, the figures are always wrapped in an unsettling atmosphere, which leads to the idea that these figures with human looks are in fact inhuman, unreal and spectral.

They might even be figures from fantasy, maybe ghosts. They could be black ghosts.

This way of painting, new to many, is becoming much common across the community of African artists belonging to the new wave of painters. Despite the different countries of origin, such as Nigeria, Cameroon, Ghana, Uganda, Senegal, Angola, Congo, Kenya, Ethiopia, etc., the members of this new group prefer to make portraits of people they are close with or well-known public figures they somehow esteem. The stories depicted in their artworks come from the everyday life or domestic scenes, always well framed and delimitated on the canvas, in which the characters move slowly, with an incredulous gaze, sometimes even resigned.

The protagonists of the scenes rarely touch each other nor interact, they are seldom drawn as happy or enthusiast. Rather frequently the circumstances are neutral or a little sad, with almost no jolts for viewers.

The stories are always rebus, with elements here and there to let the spectators imagine a story that often is not understood and therefore remains only in the artist’s mind. Will it be an event set in reality or simply a fantastic and visionary story?

However, undoubtedly the paintings come from the artists’ dreams, visions, they are born out of nowhere, with a few jolts of fantasy similarly, maybe, to their existence. They may be visions coming from their psyche linked to memories from childhood and adolescence, set in places that have not much to offer, scenes that appear extremely simple, common and ordinary to our eyes, but that maybe are special for them. Perhaps this is due to the fact that these artists’ past life in their motherland offered them even a worse reality than the one they depict.

When we gathered these artists to announce the planning of the group show and told them that The Black Ghost would have been the title, they all welcomed the project instantly, with enthusiasm and without asking for further explanations.

When we told them the exhibition title, they already knew exactly what works they needed to make; they already knew they belonged to The Black Ghost