BLACK PASSAGE. A solo exhibition of work by Serge Alain Nitegeka. At Stevenson until Saturday. DANNY SHORKEND reviews
FOLLOW the lines that direct one in a subway underground; move from room to room in a sparse, neat gallery and meander in and out and between buildings as one makes ones way in the city. Nitegeka disrupts easy passage – instead one reaches dead-ends, no-man’s-land and closures, even enclosures. Instead of the gallery as a means to show work, the gallery is complicit as a work wherein the art is integrated with its walls, doorways and twists and turns of the space itself.
The exhibition reminds me of early supremacist exhibitions, and while this may have more contemporary vision and meaning, in both cases materiality in context is precisely materiality materialised, that is it obscures a sense of philosophical release and aloofness and it inhabits the space “the viewer” traverses. It also contests that space and then leads “the viewer” no-where.
The fact that ‘objecthood’ complicates whether this is an exhibition of “mere” design, sculpture, painting or installation – even a theatrical performance as one moves in amongst these various forms – so the artists’ formal language begins to speak.
What could these formal “designs” mean? One is that the tension between flat painting on board, flat “painting” on the surface of the gallery wall contradicts the tactility of surface texture and also that these abstract forms push and pull against one another so that depth begins to emerge. That there is physical (and psychical) depth is thus reasserted with the very thickness of the frames, the fact that one “painting” juts out at right angles from the wall and is painted on both sides.
Other interventions are weird painting-sculptures that occupy much space, while the surface of the gallery walls are buffered by more surface, often appearing to break open. Paint and wooden surface are physically present as are the presences of the emphatic, geometric lines, that is an abstract device that, as Rothko called it, are “living organisms” (referring to the power of line to vitiate, give weight and optical movement to creator and viewer alike).
Yet the question remains: what is the meaning here? What do the surface upon surfaces reveal? Is it the case of the proverbial onion that is ultimately vacuous, just a play of surfaces? That art is often just a commodity, a thing with no invisible content? That this world, embroiled as it is in every day matters that lead to nothingness or displacement – the weight of the refugee and the disruption to life that natural disaster brings in its wake. Whatever the calamity, art then offers not images of ideal hope nor vain beauty, but the objectification of “stuff” that refuses to simply hang on a wall or a pedestal surrounded by triumphant Doric columns or high ceiling vaults.
Nitegeka’s aesthetic is one of angst, that is all the more pernicious for that emotion is not cathartically released, but simply caught in the play of things themselves: pure colour, with no references; “subway lines” leading one to an impasse and are self-referential.
More specifically, it is the game of art in the face of meaninglessness, and sculptural works that are a kind of jumble or empathy boxes, with no particular use or function.
While this assessment may appear depressing, there is another, more hopeful side: Nitegeka offers the idea that there are multi-faceted dimensions to things, that is in the “purity” of line and colour, there is also the irregular and surprising, and that stripped of externalities, all things reveal the same substructure, a kind of metaphysical unity or in terms of physics, the string theory of matter, namely that beneath the surface and the texture of things is a vibrating, symphonic, energetic mixing and matching in, between and around the “10 000 things”.
Whether this unified field concept leads beyond theory to the world of practicalities and human affairs remains to be seen, whether in point of fact, we do or do not live in a “global village”.
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