Kendell Geers, ‘AfroPunk’, exhibition image. Courtesy: the artist
Art as Exorcism – ‘AfroPunk’ – Kendell Geers
from the press release
“Nothing could be more logical: Geers is a realist in precisely the sense intended by Courbet, which is to say, an artist who means to represent material forces at work, through systematically stripping away the layers of the ideal (or of ideology) that obliterate our comprehension of the real.” Nicolas Bourriaud
Kendell GeersTwilight of the Idols (Fetish) 3, 2005Found object, chevron tape
“In 1907, Picasso entered the Trocadero in Paris and found himself taken by the power of African Art. He spoke of the experience as a “revelation” no less. “When I went to the Trocadéro it was disgusting. The flea market. The smell. I was all alone. I wanted to get away. But I didn’t leave. I stayed. I stayed. I understood something very important: something was happening to me, wasn’t it ? The masks weren’t like other kinds of sculpture. Not at all. They were magical things.”
He understood the power of African art, describing them as “…weapons. To help people stop being dominated by spirits, to become independent. Tools. If we give form to the spirits, we become independent of them. …… Les Demoiselles d ’Avignon must have come to me that day, but not at all because of the forms: but because it was my first canvas of exorcism.”
The result is neither African Art, not European Art, but a dialogue between cultures, a dialogue that is as much about Picasso as it is about Traditional African Art. AfroPunk is a meditation on reading, an exorcism of subject, form and tradition, images trapped at the border between our expectations and the boundaries of our experience.
Kendell GeersFlesh of the Spirit 19, 2016Bronze
see exhibition details @ rodolphe janssen : AfroPunk
EXHIBITION FROM 08.09 > 28.10.2017
7 Sep 2017 – 28 Oct 2017
Didier Claes
1000 Brussels
rodolphe janssen
1050 Brussels
Kendell GeersMutus Liber 954, 2014Indian ink, gesso on lost object
Kendell Geers, AfroPunk, installation view, rodolphe janssen, Brussels, Belgium 2017
Kendell GeersFlesh of the Spirit 59, 2017Bronze
