NYAB Event - Serge Alain Nitegeka “Morphings in BLACK”

Serge Alain Nitegeka “Morphings in BLACK”

Boesky East

This event has ended.

Serge Alain Nitegeka repurposes modernist preoccupations with line and the picture plane, utilizing these formal concepts as a foundation from which to address larger social issues such as the forced migration of peoples and the political and cultural borders that define us.

For this exhibition, Nitegeka presents new paintings that refer directly to the series of sculptural site-specific installations that he has created since 2008. These installations – large-scale and ephemeral – bisect space and choreograph the viewer’s movement, proposing the physical and conceptual conditions that the artist, as a refugee, has himself encountered. Rather than illustrating these events, the resultant paintings are documents of them. Sourced from photographs taken by the artist, the paintings are aestheticized memories of past events, re-addressed and re-worked into a new and wholly autonomous form.

Just as the artist’s installations present spatial inquiries, so the paintings propose similar exploration. The combination of painted surfaces, visible unprimed plywood support, and geometric forms presents an oscillation between flatness and suggested perspective; here, the works enter into the modernist conversation surrounding the interruption of the painted surface. This uncanny sense of space is particularly apparent in the large-scale paintings, which loom and invite, only to thwart the viewer’s point of entry. This visual tension embodies these works’ hybrid nature as abstract compositions that also relate directly to the outside world and lived experience.

A self-portrait of the artist, exemplifying his talents as draughtsman, offers an unexpected pendant to these “abstract” works. Here, the artist again returns to photographic sources, mining pictures of himself as well as his relatives. For the artist, this act of drawing presents a search for his roots as much as an aesthetic endeavor. Just as the paintings refer to and investigate past events, so the portrait proposes a similar exploratory revelation.