Moongazer by Elpedio Robinson.
Cedric Wilson, Contributor
ART IN Jamaica is alive - exhibitions abound and galleries overflow. But what makes the art scene particularly exciting is that a number of artists are pushing boundaries and creating in their work a type of magical realism that is authentically Jamaican.
While magical realism has been considered a category of art from as far back as the mid-1920s the term ascended into wider currency in recent times because of a growing interest in Latin American literature. One Hundred Years of Solitude a fascinating tragic-comedy by Colombian writer and Nobel Laureate, Gabriel Marquez, is often held up in literary circles as a paradigm of this style. Chilean novelist Isabel Allende, with works such as Eva Luna and the Brazilian Paulo Coelho, with international bestseller The Alchemist, can also be placed in this school.
As a literary mode, magical realism accepts that interwoven within the fabric of the natural is the supernatural. It posits that time does not proceed in a straight line but it is cyclical and it embraces the notion that the fantastic is an inevitable part of reality. Therefore, from the perspective of the magical realist, life may be monotonous and prosaic; survival may be tragic-comedy but, nevertheless, it is in a sense a dream.
And so the magical realist never tries to present a logical or psychological explanation for supernatural events but simply regards it as a normal state of being. This runs counter to the thrust of western thought that elevates reason, sometimes pretentiously, above intuition. It is orientation that scoffs at the beliefs of the native Latin Americans and belittles certain aspects of the African culture. Magical realism is, therefore, a bold artistic assertion that not everything in life can be explained and that reality in many ways is a mystery.
In many respects the works of artists, Leonard Barnes, Mazola Wa Mwashighadi and Elpedio Robinson parallel what Gabriel Marquez and others have put on page - except that they have splashed it on canvas.
Barnes, in an untitled piece, captures Port Royal sequestered and sleepy with numerous fishing boats bobbing in the sea. However, there is tension in the painting between the seen and the unseen. Above, the sky is beautiful but at the same time it is both monolithic and menacing as if the quiet village is about to be disturbed by reckless and blood thirsty buccaneers or maybe it is on the brink of destruction from an implacable God still angry that it was the vilest city on earth centuries ago. Barnes' presentation is unmistakably Port Royal but it is presented through a veil of mystery.
WILD ABANDON
Mazola Wa Mwashighadi, the Kenyan artist who has adopted Jamaica as his home, is profound. In one of his pieces Carnival, he depicts a dancer legs wide apart as she gyrates in wild abandonment and amusement. But her dance extends far beyond the immediate environment because interwoven in it is the supernatural. She dances to ancestral drums and a drummer sits in the background using the dancer's right hand to beat the drum. The woman is also possessed because if you look carefully there is another person inside of her. The experience of carnival speaks to an impulse that runs deep within us, and that is primeval and ancestral.
Elpedio Robinson is another Jamaican whose work over the years has been an outpouring of creativity. His work, the Moon Gazer is a paradox. It portrays a nude lying on her back full of desires and waiting. As she waits the moonlight transforms her bedroom into a landscape that has no walls where lunacy and love are intertwined into something boundless and magical. The paradox is that there is an eye at the centre of the moon and the real moon gazer is the moon and not the woman.
There is a tendency for magical realism to be seen as a form of surrealism. However, in the case of Jamaican expression of this phenomenon it is not. Surrealism as an art movement emerged after the First World War and it came as reaction to the agonising consequence of western 'reason' and the havoc it creates. The surrealist tends to create a sense of shock in the viewer, primarily by mutilating objects and randomly reassembling them in unexpected places. It gives expression to the illogical and the unconscious; according to Antonin Artaud, a leading figure in early movement 'Surrealism is not a style. It is the cry of a mind turning back on itself'. As such, there is a tendency within surrealism to push our credulity to its limits and to glorify the grotesque. This is not evident in the Jamaican expression of magical realism, which, although it is enigmatic, is not revolting.
Magical realism emerging in Latin American and the Caribbean is similar to surrealism, since both confront western 'reason'. However, unlike surrealism, it is not so much a reaction, but rather a post-colonial assertion of the acceptance of the supernatural in everyday life.
These three artists work independent of each other and their adventure into magical realism is not an organised effort, neither is it ideologically driven. Like their literary counterparts in Latin America they are responding to irrepressible artistic impulses shaped by the tension between an indigenous and African culture that is natural and a euro centricity that was imposed.
