Gideon Appah, the Painter Melding Fantasy and Ghana’s Postcolonial Actuality

In his mystical, jewel-like compositions, Ghanaian painter Gideon Appah suspends time past previous, current and future. His intensely vibrant canvases are populated both by nude or semi-nude figures languishing in a personal eden, a tranquil, prelapsarian world, or by suited males smoking exterior a nightclub, reflecting these shifting temporalities. These usually fictitious characters, painted in various hues of ochre and aquamarine, emanate from outdated newspaper leisure columns and classic Ghanaian movie stills in addition to the artist’s vivid creativeness.

For his debut solo exhibition within the UK, and his first with Tempo Gallery since becoming a member of their roster final September, Appah presents 9 new works that distil probably the most thrilling components of his blossoming follow. Constructing upon the success of final yr’s landmark exhibition on the Institute for Modern Artwork in Richmond, Virginia, Say Sorry in a Thousand Lights sees Appah mix components of Ghana’s postcolonial historical past along with his sometimes vibrant renderings of otherworldly fantasy.

Appah is an artist for whom discovered photos present ignition. For this exhibition nevertheless, he initiated the method himself, exploring Ghana’s shoreline alongside the outskirts of Accra in the hunt for deserted buildings to {photograph}. What he found involves the floor within the ghostly tranquillity of Evening Imaginative and prescient, during which the shimmering type of an island fort, illuminated by a celestial night time sky, is mirrored within the surrounding water. This might effectively be one of many 40-odd castles alongside Ghana’s coast initially constructed to incarcerate slaves earlier than they have been despatched on the perilous Center Passage. The fort’s spectral presence and colonial connotation are embraced and reworked by Appah into one thing akin to an outpost of the underworld, paying homage to Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Lifeless (1880).

In different works, Appah attracts upon Ghana’s postcolonial cinema and the emergence of Ghallywood as a harbinger of the nation’s new nationwide identification. “I’m obsessive about outdated Ghanaian motion pictures,” he says, scrolling by means of countless movie stills that he has saved on his cellphone. From Mr Mensah Builds a Home (1955) to Kukurantumi: Highway to Accra (1983), these movies not solely present photos as inspiration, however replicate a interval of mass urbanisation in Ghana’s historical past, throughout which Accra’s inhabitants grew quickly and the prevalence of unbiased cinemas allowed the capital’s nightlife to thrive. “These motion pictures spoke extra about on a regular basis life, about new prospects the nation was beginning to speak in confidence to,” explains Appah. This newfound freedom is manifested within the louche poses and sharp sartorial silhouettes of Cloud Males, a continuation of earlier work like Roxy 2 that may very well be a nod to Barkley L Hendricks’ iconic white-clad figures in What’s Going On (1974). 

On the centre of this exhibition, nevertheless, are Appah’s exquisitely hallucinatory depictions of water, which repeat throughout 5 of the 9 works with refined variations in tone and texture. Utilizing a black primer on his canvas, Appah coaxes mild from darkish, initially utilizing oils as underpainting earlier than making use of layers of acrylics in some areas and scratching layers off in others to create a kaleidoscopic tapestry of color. “I needed to do one thing to make the water extra attention-grabbing,” says Appah. “[This technique] makes it dreamlike. It’s a special world.” Impressed by the proximity to the ocean from his studio on the outskirts of Accra, the flattened perspective of mountainous backdrops in these works contribute to the sense of being, within the artist’s phrases, “out of time, misplaced”.

In The Sensitivity of On a regular basis Issues, Appah reduces any sense of perspective additional nonetheless, surrounding the busts of two males with an assortment of objects and disembodied arms. In his discount of a wider story to a set of damaged fragments, the work recollects Fra Angelico’s San Marco frescoes, significantly The Mocking of Christ (1440), during which the total spectrum of Christ’s tribulations is diminished to a collection of disembodied arms and different iconographic symbols. The identical is true of Appah’s work extra typically, whose dense evocation of narrative and symbolism expands right into a a lot wider myriad of interpretation, inviting viewers right into a world of fantasy and enigma that’s inconceivable to withstand.

Say Sorry in a Thousand Lights by Gideon Appah is on present at Tempo Gallery in London till 15 April 2023.