SEYNI AWA CAMARA, JOHN MCALLISTER

Seyni Awa Camara’s sculptures embrace traditional craft to fashion creatures evoking the ambiguous divinities of the indigenous arts. With raw materiality, her sculptures affirm their tangible presence, while the solid colours in McAllister’s paintings suggest a luxuriant reverie.

In his work, McAllister does not simply seek to ‘document the world as it is.’ On the contrary, his paintings are part of the tradition of major twentieth-century artists such as Matisse and Bonnard. He strives to capture light without limiting himself to simply depicting the contemporary world. Instead he emphasises a kind of representation that is connected to geologic time and the unchanging world of sensation.

His vivid palette, with shades of pink, red, and orange, evokes sunrise on Earth before the arrival of humankind, in the midst of luxuriant, fertile nature. These are the colours of the dawn of the world.

The verticality of Camara’s sculptures, with their solid connection to their base, contrasts with the minimising of perspective in McAllister’s paintings, and allows viewers’ eyes to relax. Witnessing the two approaches in this exhibition produces a feeling of wholeness and well-being.

Press release courtesy Almine Rech. Text: Milena Oldfield.