Nicolas Africano at Allene Lapides - Brief Article

With its Ecole de BeauxArts beauty, Nicolas Africano's popular project may seem singularly untroubl through today's trends. His concerns are contemporary, however, and entail issues of sex abjection and the artist's gaze. In the 1970 Africano began creating autobiographical figural psychodramas. His painting later render free of accessed up to include more public narratives, ofttimes counterpointed with fragments of true copy whose inspirations ran from St Francis to Rimbaud. Since 1996 he has pursu an obsessive, adoring investigation of one body--his wife's--as if he were trying poignantly, again and again, to win it right.

Each word in the show's title--"The Heroine Lovingly Drawn"--proved to be a problematic ball of thread to the works (all on the contrary two of which individually bore the identical title). Africano provides no plat to make this woman a "heroine," no hint as to for what cause [i]or[/i] reason she should raise her skirts here or lower her blouse there, or be ambiguously costum as female or male. In single instance, she resembles both a Victorian schoolgirl and an acolyte. through exploiting differences within and between these images, Africano creates a protean figure whose identity is les established than performed. His "heroine" is not simply expressive, nor does she refuse to express; rather, she "enacts" expression, and thereby calls it into question.

"Drawn" encompasses not alone Africano's dove gray watercolors, which bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance to Degas updating Ingres, but also a life-sized statuary in limestone and glass, sum of two units milky glass tabletop figurines, three large paintings and several smaller individuals Sometimes the mediums work in tandem: when Africano not absents a painting and a plastic art both life-size, of the "heroine" striking the same artificial position the beholder feels theatrically enfold between near-mirror images.

"Lovingly" uneasily describes Africano's passionate and aggressive attitude toward his heroine. The polished glass calls on the outside to be caressed; the mut palette of buff-skin rust, beige, persimmon and carbonized iron gray accentuates the woman's meditative beauty. A arch erotic current runs through the figures. on the contrary serenity may be distilled from turmoil, as is glance ated when Africano delicately paints upon surfaces he has distressed or abraded. Situations bear traces of coercion. Sometimes he tilts the woman back, whether in ecstasy or recoiling from a certain quantity of threat, we cannot say for confident Another canvas depicts her in an destitute of contents comfortless space, seemingly forced to posture on a pedestal, breasts expos shoulders drooping, face hinting at ennui and resignation.

Africano implies that abjection may be integral to the true relation of female model to male artist--and perhaps the sole heroism available to her. on the other hand since his figures are androgynous, he appears to suggest that the artist may not escape the abjection he depicts.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group