Shades of Human Nature

Abdoulaye Konaté, Barthélemy Toguo, Ronald Muchatuta & Turiya Magadlela

27 October 2021 – 19 February 2022

How do you paint human nature? What spectrum of colours, colourisms, and codes create a cacophony, or symphony, through composition? Bloom Galerie’s first group exhibition, Shades of Human Nature: Storytelling Through Resilient Colour, poses these questions through recent works by four distinct artists: Abdoulaye Konaté, Turiya Magadlela, Ronald Muchatuta, and Barthélemy Toguo. From global identity politics and cultural displacement to origin theories and the radical power of joy, the aesthetic explorations of human nature across the series featured communicate a harmonious dissonance of the spiritual and modern. Colour resiliently tells stories through diverse and interwoven materials, elements, and icons stemming from everyday life: Konaté’s Malian dyed fabrics, Magadlela’s stretched pantyhose, Muchatuta’s mixed media collages, and Toguo’s watery dreamscapes of acrylic, ink, and pigment.

Abdoulaye Konaté is renowned for his dexterous and collaborative use of woven and dyed cloths native to his country. By interweaving local aesthetics and cosmology with global geopolitics and social commentary, he creates powerfully multi-layered unions of different cultural systems. The large-scale, vertical tapestries on display are all from the past year and a half, hailing from Konaté’s iconic glossary of shape, colour, and texture connoting communication, representation, and commemoration. Key concepts behind his works include addressing timeless socio-political struggles, venerating craft as a tool of cultural storytelling, emphasising Malian humanist values, and establishing a rich colour language through resilient, playful variations on shade and shape. In these more recent works, however, the personal, aesthetic, and symbolic take precedence over the political, centring their focus on human nature and universal harmony rooted in a West African sensibility to find balance.

Turiya Magadlela analogously roots her process of storytelling in abstract compositions, whereby material, distortion, and colour serve as tools for personal and collective expression. Her newer works in this exhibition are all derived from the artist’s recurring minimalist manipulations of women’s pantyhose – a fragile yet durable material holding the weight of womanhood. Strips of multicoloured nylon – the ghosts of legs now rendered abstractly, evocative of what laid between them – are stretched across canvas, imbued with the physical and emotional energy of their maker. These personal traces may come through in a variety of impetuses and impulses: reflecting on the challenging or cherished experiences of being a woman living in Africa; resonating with the rhythm of a vivacious song; or meditating upon contemporary socio-political struggles. Magadlela’s marks interweave the culturally specific with the universally transcendent, from statements on cultural displacement and the colonial gaze to environmental sustainability and the safeguarding of children. And thus the overlapping of the personal and political pulsing throughout Magadlela’s work – sometimes translucent, sometimes opaque – paints a space of everyday human nature. What was once worn by bodies – wasted, recycled, stretched, ripped, and transformed – is rendered transparent: at once fragile and beautiful, distorted yet liberated. Voids left behind become spaces to be filled. Isolated colours change in the company of their neighbouring shades, becoming something greater than its parts.

Magadlela’s process is a choreography of colour and control – pulls and tears become shapes and shades. Whilst her visual language is indexed through an inventory of evocative titles with corresponding colour stories, each work simultaneously represents a sense of freedom through the intuitive and emotive process in which it was created. In lieu of sketches the artist works with sensations, symbols, and stories. Each piece functions as a resilient effort to restore languages – local Africa dialects and belief systems endangered by the colonial hierarchy of English and homogenous status quos, respectively. The spectrum of hues in Magadlela’s lexicon is poignantly exhibited through the unique new works presented, including Thula (2021) with its layers of stretched whites and overlapping pale blues, hiding and exposing darker blues, purples, and probing shadows. It is a meditation on being told to be quiet, to ‘shut up’, conjuring the multi-layered meanings of the Zulu word dually meaning ‘cease’ but also ‘peace’. In Something about red and purple (2021) colour codes contrast in a background of erotic red with joyful yellows and hot pinks amongst more tenuous purples, alluding to a historical sense of royalty countered by more contemporary readings of neglect, ageism, and sexual frustration – or more poignantly, the frustration of being socially repressed.

And finally, there is the never-ending array of shades found in the artist’s iconic and persistent Inequalities series: for there is no hiding behind these black and white lines and shapes, which wear their imbalances physically as much as they do psychologically or socio-politically. Finding vulnerability in the endless monochromatism, honesty is what’s left behind. Thus here, in the counterbalance of positive and negative spaces, do the stories of artist and audience mix and swell – it is where past meets present and personal meets politics, all in a framework of endurance and hope. In honour of her own father’s artistic practice, fostered in a creative hub during apartheid in South African where critical and multidisciplinary voices could not be silenced, Magadlela continues in this wake: making visible, giving voice, telling stories, and finding freedom through colour. Her practice continues an enduring expression of black consciousness, ensuring the cultural legacy of the African Renaissance is not only never forgotten, but also continued in contemporary conversations through a new language of colour-coding, radical craft, and conceptual collectivity.

Ronald Muchatuta’s layered, multi-media canvases entail a kindred methodology whereby the absence or balance of colour are key to establishing a compelling composition and dimensional feeling. His collages encompass a masterly technique of image-sourcing, bringing to life texture and contrast through a careful sensitivity towards colour, art history, and human connection. Muchatuta’s mark-making practice is deeply steeped in process, from initial research to physical cutting to conceptually putting back together. Indeed in lieu of the end product being at the forefront of the artist’s mind, he embraces the spontaneous and trusts his intuition, leading to a world of spontaneous and infinite abstraction. Whilst his oeuvre often seeks to explore the depths of darker, diasporic references from displacement to discrimination, his recent body of work Kuramama (Shona for To Survive) is a topical search for the beauty that can be found in moments of breath – the cross-section between life and death. Emerging from the artist’s experience throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, with projects being cancelled and mobility constantly restricted, this series embraced the literal and metaphysical nature of the upside-down. Muchatuta’s creative impulse reached towards the personal, reflecting internally on human nature and the circle of life through ideas of legacy, spirituality, nostalgia, beauty, and cultural conditioning. Through this resilient impetus, the artist’s colour palette opened up along with his subject matter, for in order to evoke a mindmap of memories, new colours came to the surface in order to vividly evoke hope and grief. These unique works offer us an escape from reality – a respite of reverie to conjure the memories that will help us survive.

In Yellow (2020), the artist’s recent attraction towards colour is vibrantly on display. The eponymous colour can be found splashed across the torn paper comprising the garment of a young girl, combining the techniques of Muchatuta’s intuitive storytelling process through collage with his emotive visual strategy through a newfound colour theory. Our eyes start with the yellow, framing the youthful protagonist and grounding the work in a deep nostalgia for many West African women and girls who will have had a reminiscent special occasion dress for birthdays and weddings. Abstract blue shapes draw our attention across the canvas only to discover hand-drawn rubber duckies amongst distinct facial features, leading towards a darker background in contrast to characterful shadows. It’s a cacophonous symphony of iconic images, torn materials, and colourful memories evoking a distinct realm where the past, present, and future all collide. A metaphorical grounding of the metaphysical can also be found in several works alluding to ancestors, with deep blue masks, yellow silhouettes, and cut-out eyes sprinkled across composite figures.

These works manifest the artist’s ideology that as humans, we consume a limitless amount of images in both our waking hours and latent dreams, leaving us to – purposefully or subconsciously – break them apart and put them back together to create worldviews. Through these imaginative compositions of confusion or even discomfort, the artist challenges traditional methods of mark-making whilst enabling audiences to see things in a different way. Indeed, Muchatuta’s art historical training is as metaphorical as it is traditional – romanticism and surrealism compete efficaciously with his more intellectual and technical aptitude, creating a hybrid space whereby the legacy of Western masters mixes with African belief systems and global art history. The results challenge the potential for myopic, insular gazes, capable of restricting a nuanced and layered depiction of what humans need to survive and thrive.

Barthélemy Toguo’s selected works on display similarly derive an impulse to tell stories through textured layers and evocative aesthetics. Yet in lieu of expressing a gesture of ‘collage’ through distinct materials and displaced surfaces, he turns to fluid renderings of heads, symbols, and abstract entities. These liquid layers pertain to an ongoing dissection of Human Nature that the artist has been embarking upon for over the past two decades, culminating in an eponymous series from 2019. Toguo’s serious yet satirical oeuvre is illustrious for its provocative, poignant depictions of human concerns ranging from migration and colonialism to human rights and freedom, and the many dualities in between. Movement, composition, and colour are key aspects to his narrative style, whereby tales are told through loose, blurry forms combining human and natural forms both physically and psychologically. These symbol-laden and politically-loaded renderings entice you with pops of colours at once intuitive and unexpected, reflecting on the Global South as a terrain to question exploitation, hierarchy, and agency. The flow of his watercolour worlds conjures the regulated flow of resources; the displacement of composition summons the displacement of people, and the manipulation of opacity reflects on colourism aesthetically and socially. These techniques invite us to reflect on the relationship between humans and our environments, from local points of view to global shades of perspective.

Each artist in this exhibition communicates, first and foremost, as an individual maker, telling stories through lived experiences, research interests, and intuitive aesthetics that lay nuanced foundations for political manifestations. In each of their depictions of human nature through distinct techniques of colour-coding, local customs and vernaculars, there is a constant state of flux with universal experiences, global injustices, and a pervading sense of hope through freedom. Through shades of metaphorical symbolism, narrative surfaces entice and activate audiences, empowering our own individual perspectives in an exchange of energy, personal history, and shared resilience. Through languages of colour the geopolitical becomes geopoetic, dreaming in diasporic layers through transcendent textures.

The works in this group show all employ codes of colour pulsing with a synesthesiac quality, ultimately creating an unexpected yet organic symphony: a surrealism of sound and symbolism. What song might Turiya Magadlela have been listening to when stretching her light purples across deep reds? What symbol-laden iconography had Barthélemy Toguo conjured to tell his unravelling story; what spiritually-imbued shape guided Abdoulaye Konaté’s new tapestries; what memory changed the composition of Ronald’s collage – suddenly or slowly, with a forceful or gentle touch? These sensory deconstructions of human nature all come from poignantly humanist perspectives, suggesting a moral framework through every shade, interpretation, and commemoration. The artistic manipulations of colour – from cacophonous inequalities to harmonic complementation – explored in this exhibition encourage us to see and to ask: what is the visual language of freedom?

Exhibition text by Curator Katherine Finerty