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Two Black and White Artists
01/11/2022
Two Black and White Artists
On Friday I looked at two artists depicting death with black and white drawings. Kentridge has taken over the first floor of the splendidly classical Royal Academy and shows wall-drawings, film, text, prints, tapestries, animation, sound, sculpture. In contrast I experienced Khan’s drawing as a small digital image among others on his Instagram feed, and although the image had comparable content to Kentridge’s its effect on me has been quite different, and has insidiously lodged in my imagination.
Khan’s heavily stylised image shows a schematic three-bay house containing a pattern of skeletal figures with raised hands, drawn in black against a white ground. A blood-red sky fits over the house like a carapace. At first sight the drawing looks like a historical diagram of how to arrange slaves in a boat so as to maximise the cargo space. It is nominally a house, but it could as easily be a tomb or a boat. Are the figures standing and looking at us, or lying down? Khan says with chilling simplicity, ‘Here is a bloody house, made up of house slaves’.
The Gingerbread House is also an image of horror, being the magical food for abandoned children Hansel and Gretel, a house in which you cannot take refuge and which fails to nourish you. The skeletons look a little like a Mexican Day of the Dead frieze, patterns arranged precisely to fill the white space in an even rhythm; the positive and negative spaces are equally valued. They speak of the gaiety of the dead, a Catholic relish in lively deadness. Fingers and ribs fan out like spiders – are they Anansi? They remind you that fingernails and hair keep growing in the tomb.
Pattern makes one think of the weaver, the Greek fate Clotho who orders our lives on her loom. Incidentally, looms also feature in banking; the Guerney banking family who became Barclays began in medieval times as Jacquard weavers and transferred this way of dealing with numbers and order into lending and borrowing numbers.
What struck me so forcefully about this drawing is the emotional power of pattern. The restraints of form provoke – almost mock - your imagination, contrasting with the actual meaty, bloody, smelly horror of the subject. The aloof thoughtfulness of the design evokes the inhuman planning of evil – slavers, Nazis – for me, more effectively than Kentridge’s lively tumult. Like a flamenco dancer, Khan expresses passion through the control of his artistry, unusual in times where hearts are generally worn on sleeves.
I came away from the Kentridge exhibition feeling surprisingly equanamous, in spite of having been drenched with a flood of moving images. Guilt, death, hunger, dispossession gush from an artist who has the medieval humour of water; torrents of sketchy figures, waterfalls of dissolving landscapes, waves of emotion.
That Khan’s is a digital image, not made from physical ink or charcoal, means that it has - at present - no material body and therefore is still an idea, making this sophisticated and sad drawing difficult to forget.
On Friday I looked at two artists depicting death with black and white drawings. Kentridge has taken over the first floor of the splendidly classical Royal Academy and shows wall-drawings, film, text, prints, tapestries, animation, sound, sculpture. In contrast I experienced Khan’s drawing as a small digital image among others on his Instagram feed, and although the image had comparable content to Kentridge’s its effect on me has been quite different, and has insidiously lodged in my imagination.
Khan’s heavily stylised image shows a schematic three-bay house containing a pattern of skeletal figures with raised hands, drawn in black against a white ground. A blood-red sky fits over the house like a carapace. At first sight the drawing looks like a historical diagram of how to arrange slaves in a boat so as to maximise the cargo space. It is nominally a house, but it could as easily be a tomb or a boat. Are the figures standing and looking at us, or lying down? Khan says with chilling simplicity, ‘Here is a bloody house, made up of house slaves’.
The Gingerbread House is also an image of horror, being the magical food for abandoned children Hansel and Gretel, a house in which you cannot take refuge and which fails to nourish you. The skeletons look a little like a Mexican Day of the Dead frieze, patterns arranged precisely to fill the white space in an even rhythm; the positive and negative spaces are equally valued. They speak of the gaiety of the dead, a Catholic relish in lively deadness. Fingers and ribs fan out like spiders – are they Anansi? They remind you that fingernails and hair keep growing in the tomb.
Pattern makes one think of the weaver, the Greek fate Clotho who orders our lives on her loom. Incidentally, looms also feature in banking; the Guerney banking family who became Barclays began in medieval times as Jacquard weavers and transferred this way of dealing with numbers and order into lending and borrowing numbers.
What struck me so forcefully about this drawing is the emotional power of pattern. The restraints of form provoke – almost mock - your imagination, contrasting with the actual meaty, bloody, smelly horror of the subject. The aloof thoughtfulness of the design evokes the inhuman planning of evil – slavers, Nazis – for me, more effectively than Kentridge’s lively tumult. Like a flamenco dancer, Khan expresses passion through the control of his artistry, unusual in times where hearts are generally worn on sleeves.
I came away from the Kentridge exhibition feeling surprisingly equanamous, in spite of having been drenched with a flood of moving images. Guilt, death, hunger, dispossession gush from an artist who has the medieval humour of water; torrents of sketchy figures, waterfalls of dissolving landscapes, waves of emotion.
That Khan’s is a digital image, not made from physical ink or charcoal, means that it has - at present - no material body and therefore is still an idea, making this sophisticated and sad drawing difficult to forget.
