PORTFOLIO – 46.

DOMINIQUE ZINKPE : FUSING RELIGION, SEX AND SATIRE.

By Nii B. Andrews.

It was at last year’s African debut of 1-54 that the work of Dominique Zinkpe came fully within my focus and cross hairs.

His sculptures and paintings were suffused with a restless energy and drama.

The latter consisted of mythical or hybrid anthropomorphic beings within a cosmic flux of colors.

The whole producing a transcendental message that appeared to reference the syncretism of Roman Catholicism and traditional African religious thought; male, female and other genders; tradition and modernity; progress and decay.

The sculptures are large with elaborately textured surfaces.

They are often aggregates of iconic traditional sculptural figures that serve to eloquently interpret stark contemporary realities.

The language of irony and satirical flourishes are not infrequently writ large into the sculptural pieces.

In some instances, the sculptures form part of large evocative installations.

The discarded footwear leading to and around an ancestral “Noah’s Ark” (as shown immediately below), reflects past and current events; in each case pointing to far from effective societal leadership which leads to tragic consequences.

By utilizing past aesthetic strategies, Zinkpe is able to unpick and unpack current unresolved tensions; largely those of building a modern, decentralized and inclusive society to replace the more restrictive dystopian – or schizoid society that rose out of West Africa’s epic traumatic/ destabilizing encounter with the West.

This is by no means an easy task since even today there are still ?”well meaning” Africans and others who refuse to see race as a purely social construct devoid of any biological or scientific basis.

“The desire to fit everything into one mold is a fantasy”, is the unequivocal  conclusion of numerous scholars including DuBois and Kwame Anthony Appiah.

Zinkpe has been successful and is one of the foremost contemporary artists from Benin; he was born in Cotonou in 1969 and still maintains a working studio there.

His work is extremely well patronized by collectors at international auctions of contemporary African art.

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