BIEN-SOLEIL CANOË

                                       Bien-Soleil Canoë

 

Tamed snakes and muted bones[1] are just a couple of images Bien-Soleil Canoë lifted from Aimé Césaire. Known for the breadth of his literary allusions, Canoë’s work is a fractured bibliography of the finest in francophone literature. As a student at the Université des Antilles, he was heavily influenced by the surrealist poet Martin Binot, the charismatic professor who served between 1982 and 1994 as the department chair of Semiology and Linguistics.

 

Also among Canoë influences was the nautical photographer Daphna Metlos, a true visionary in the field of activist ecological documentation.

 

While some claim that Canoë has yet to emerge from his apprenticeship, others see great insight and originality in his admittedly narrow scope of work. When the five-hour documentary video Les Serpents Apprivoisés was screened at the Venice Biennale in 2012, while most attendees walked out, the few who remained described the piece as transformative and operatic. 

 

 

 

  

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[1] From Aimé Césaire’s poem C’est moi-même, terreur, c’est moi-même

MABRUK SAF-SAL

Mabruk Saf-Sal

 

The monumental multimedia installation, Je soulève tout[1], was, by all accounts, a failure. Between power outages, drunken puppeteers, and a four-day transit strike, the piece came off as shoddy and incoherent. The public was baffled and the critics, (expecting something entirely different based on the press releases), were vengeful. Recovering from a professional debacle of this magnitude required a clever and aggressive philosophical riposte.

 

Mabruk Saf-Sal quickly renounced performance art, calling it “exhibitionism of the clinically depressed.”[2] After publishing two manifestos[3]advocating for the continued urgency of kitsch, Saf-Sal started painting for the first time since art school.

 

After an improvised process of remedial draftsmanship training (Saf-Sal immersed himself in the anatomical engravings of William Cheseldon and Hunter’s studies of midwifery), he embarked on a new body of Pop Art inflected work.

 

Both the public and the critical community were equally, though differently, assuaged.  

 

 

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[1] Exhibited at the Frieze Baku, November 2009

[2] “exhibitionnisme des déprimés cliniques”

[3] Pop is King, appearing in the January 2010 issue of Art in Quebec and Je ne suis pas désolé, 2010, (210 pages) which was distributed privately in limited edition.

 

SMITH TI-HO

 

Smith Ti-Ho

 

Is it mad to think of oneself as “the last human being?” When with gleeful blasphemy you deliberately create misfortune, it might be a comfort to consider oneself “the last.”

 

Smith Ti-Ho admittedly reads too much Nietzsche. His gloomy visions are reminiscent of Boileau, Musil and early Roustard (with whom he studied at the Université des Trois-Montagnes). Before he became a painter, he was a philosophy student, which partially explains both his temperament and his choices of imagery. He was briefly associated with the Mouvement Scolaire and showed an unusual talent for writing manifestos. 

 

Saint Sébastien, (or San Sebastián) became an early motif for Ti-Ho, probably because of his penchant for self-pity. It took years before he made the subject truly his own. His working process includes an unfathomable act of cruelty where he insists his models impale themselves with real arrows.

 

With or without his consent, Smith Ti-Ho is considered one of today’s most important Catholic artists. 

 

 

 

 

STEVE ALOIS ABULAFIA

Steve Alois Abulafia

It may have been a chance meeting with Carlos Arana. The Juan Matus Café was always a fortuitous place for momentous coincidences. On the other hand, it could have been a camping trip near Kashamarka. Steve Alois Abulafia can be a bit slippery when he's talking about his work. Mysticism, shamanism, hallucination, prophecy, are all terms Abulafia freely and misleadingly uses in the course of his many interviews.

 

As a professor at Cueta College of Art and Design, he was known more for stubbornly insisting upon the primacy of the western canon. Kandinsky, not Castaneda, was his north star for metaphysical symbolism. Abulafia is a baffling mosh-pit of contradiction, and that might be where his primary strengths reside. He deliberately misdirects while his thankless champions repeatedly fail to pin him down.

 

“Isn’t beauty enough,” he rhetorically asked the visibly frustrated Bashira Indigo on CBC’s Arte Ahora. Being on television always brings out the worst in Abulafia.

 

He swore never again to use the color red, and for five years he kept his word. The paintings he produced during this period are universally considered his worst.

SHIRA SHIR-HASHIRIM

Shira Shir-Hashirim

It was only after the Tinterburgh riots did Sheila Shir-Hashirim begin to consider herself as an artist. Before that, painting was just a hobby, something she had a talent for but never thought of as a serious, adult enterprise.

 

Witnessing the savage choreography of violence changed all that. Pasonville prior to that awful April afternoon in 2003 wasn’t known for its volatility, but one can never be too confident about what simmers beneath the surface. Shir-Hashirim was there and was hit over the head and on the back of her neck with a braided bastinado. She saw blood and she saw death but she also saw acts of unexpected mercy. She saw her life as if from the outside and it was when she found herself hiding behind a plumbago bush for a full two hours she realized the life of a fitness trainer was not for her.

 

She left Pasonville soon afterward and settled in Michena. At the time Michena was known for its poetry scene, its bourbon latte cafés, and its tolerance for idleness. It was the perfect place for radical reinvention and Shira Shir-Hashirim quickly fell in with the local acrobats, gamblers, and painters.

 

Her work developed slowly but it never deviated from its core iconography. Lush beauty and escapism, though frowned upon in places like New York and Paris, was fully embraced by the local critics and curators. 

 

TOMER TAMARIN

Tomer Tamarin

Tomer Tamarin

 

A childhood filled with farm animals and pre-dawn treks though icy patches of barren pastures left a profound impression upon the young Tomer Tamarin. The easiest decision he ever made was to leave home at 15-years-old and immigrate to the United States. Accustomed to rural discomforts and the irritations of constant cold weather, being homeless in New York in the 1980’s was an easy adjustment. 

 

Though barely pubescent, Tamarin’s matted hair and precociously scruffy chin allowed him to pass as a young adult. He quickly made friends with a rough community of East Village poets who published their works in short-lived independent journals, fringe zines, and mimeographed pamphlets that they distributed at subways stations and coffee shops. One of these tawdry pamphlets became the Saint Marks Memos, the longest lasting independent poetry quarterly in the United States. Tomer Tamarin was their principle graphic designer from 1983 – 1985.

 

When Tamarind turned (legitimately) twenty, he joined the Samovar Collective, a small but influential theater company famous for introducing the works of the Ukrainian avant-garde to the North American public. It was there where he met Bohuslava Gamarnik, Zora Jabotinsky, and Yulia Zyvahlisky. He eventually went on to marry Gamarnik, a tragic misalliance that lasted barely a year, and with whom he had a daughter, the painter Sally Tamarin-Tathe.

 

Tamarin briefly changed his name to Richie Neale and it was during that period where he stole his first camera. It was a single lens reflex with a light leak that led to streaky distortions and glaring, crisscrossed flashes. In the heady downtown New York art scene of the time, his work was a major success. As Richie Neale he showed his work beside Valentin Bjog, Star Healy, Constance McClesmer, and Barry Stein in the notorious Hindenberg exhibition at Shatnez fils on Avenue B. From that early success, he went on to be represented by Furstenberg on 57^th Street.

 

Things went south after a two-year cocaine binge that cost him his career and the custody of his daughter. Luckily Tamarin had his birth name to fall back on. In one of the greatest reinvention stories of contemporary art, Tomer Tamarin reemerged as if from nowhere. He shaved his head and his beard, appeared only in dark tortoise shell sunglasses and took to wearing a silver chained Our Lady of Guadeloupe medallion around his neck. At first, only a few of his old friends recognized him.  

 

His work shifted from the Richie Neale high contrast images of leather and teacups to the poignant diptychs of the climate advocate, Tomer Tamarin. 

 

RIVIERE DÉCOLLETAGE

 Riviere Décolletage

 

What exactly is an “exotic dancer”?  What are “fine arts”?  How does one “make do”?

 

As a seventeen-year-old high school dropout, Riviere Décolletage was diagnosed with LSDD, a rare and fortuitous neurological dysfunction. Lergereto’s Synthetic Developmental Disorder (LSDD) is a form of dyslexia that uniquely effects the comprehension of paired words. Dr. Dimitri Dunnhuong whose groundbreaking research in dyscalculia earned him a MacArthur Fellowship, has written extensively on LSDD. In a 1987 paper[1] published in the French journal Documents neurologiques, Dunnhuong argued that poets as varied as Gertrude Stein, William Blake, and Homer all suffered from LSDD in one form or another. According to Professor Dunnhuong, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus could only be fully comprehended if read with a full focus on the recurrence of paired words[2].    

 

Riviere Décolletage may or may not be familiar with Dr. Dunnhuong’s research, but that seems entirely beside the point. Décolletage’s “word paintings” are nonetheless vivid (and beautiful) illuminations on the inadvertent lyric nature of human speech.

 

A larger version of Désir pérenne, which appeared together with Reduire seduire, and Bake Off as a triptych in the 1998 Tokyo Biennial, has earned Riviere Décolletage a permanent niche in the post-modern canon of Neo-Expressionist Semiology.

 

 

 

 

 

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[1] Les poètes de l'arrière-plan. Documents neurologiques, Éditions gatopardo, 1987

[2] According to Professor Dunnhuong, there is no translation of the Tractatus that reflects the critical importance of the recurring paired words.