Cheikh Ndiaye “Memories of Underdevelopment”

Half Gallery

[Image: Cheikh Ndiaye "Apolo Havana" (2020) Oil on linen 69 x 63 in. ]

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The paintings of Cheikh Ndiaye are inquiries into the current state of modernist dreams. The artist evokes images of human resilience, which serve as commentaries on our own times. Referring to the novel of the Cuban writer Edmundo Desnoes, Memories of Underdevelopment and the 1968 movie by the same title, directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, the artist questions how history imprints into our material environment.

In the series of oil paintings of movie theaters, Ndiaye portrays the human condition in West-African cities and in Cuba. He pays homage to these worlds in which the scarcity of means become the very potential for human creativity. Along with the movie theaters, he depicts informal constructions, improvised workshops, street vendors’ kiosks, and social practices in their surroundings. Ndiaye represents the interstices between the public and the private, between the interior and the exterior. In these spaces of in-betweenness, as in Walter Benjamin’s evocation of the city of Naples, porosity becomes the “inexhaustible law”[1] and “each private act is permeated by streams of communal life.”[2]

African movie theaters in Ndiaye’s paintings are material archives of an epoch that followed the structural adjustment programs imposed on countries such as Senegal and Ivory Coast by The Bretton Woods Institutions since the 1980s: an epoch marked by a progressive de-development, rural exodus, and privatization of public infrastructure. They are a chiasmus connecting two temporalities: the Independence era in which Africa projected itself into the future, and our present moment. Likewise, the Cuban movie theaters—which are halfway between inevitable dilapidation and attentive preservation—appear as petrified moments of historical change. In his paintings, Ndiaye does not judge; he depicts the current state of the situation and makes an inventory of humanity’s aspirations imprinted in brick and concrete.

The artist renders in great detail the dilapidated walls of many of these buildings: mold and dust, peeling plaster, stains, graffiti, torn posters, and residues of fading paint. In Apolo Movie Theater, Havana (2020) and in Sala Avenida Movie Theater, Havana (2020), he depicts the improbable patchwork of bright diluted colors that wall painters are forced to improvise because of the difficulty of finding paint on the market of a country struck by the embargo. In Ifan, Cheikh Anta Diop (2020), what might seem like a portrait of the great Senegalese historian is in fact a depiction of a wall engraving near the Fundamental Institute of Black Africa in Dakar (IFAN). While Ndiaye’s paintings often retain an almost documentary quality, the concrete rendering of wall surfaces is a clear affirmation of the materiality of painting. It can remind us of the opposition between the pictoriality of painting and its iconic qualities analyzed by the French philosopher and art historian Hubert Damisch.[3] By using these terms, the latter emphasized that the presence of a painting cannot be reduced to an image-like representation.

In his works, Ndiaye frequently plays with the notions of memory, archive, and remembrance. For if we admit that architecture can serve as a historical archive, then what does the current state of these buildings tell us about our ability to recollect the period in which they were built? It might be that the sediments of history spanning from their construction to our present moment are written in the layers of paint on these walls like some geological strata. And if Ndiaye—through the materiality of the walls—strives to render present past memories, in Yacuba Sylla Movie Theater, Divo (2020) and in Historical Museum, Gorée (2020), he questions their very emergence. In these works, the blurred atmospheric rendering of a movie theater and of the Gorée Island—from which slaves were exported—triggers the reemergence of a memory image in our mind. In an act of remembrance, the image, at first vague and nebulous, is progressively resurrected like a vivid dream and connects with our sensibility. Ndiaye explores subtle polarities of painting—as if painting was an oneiric shimmering of image and the matter.

Ndiaye questions the link between painting and architecture. The history of this link can be traced to the Italian Quattrocento and to Filippo Brunelleschi’s invention of linear perspective, which has been interpreted as an inherently architectural element within painting. Likewise, Ndiaye’s artworks interrogate the relationship between surface and volume, shadow and light, architectural representation and painting. In Vox Movie Theater Saint-Louis (2020), the shadow of a palm tree and of its elongated leaves rustling in the wind projected on the wall of a movie theater reminds us of the very definition of painting. According to this definition—this myth of origin—cited among others by the Renaissance theorist Leon Battista Alberti, painting originated in the projection of a shadow on the wall and the drawing of its edges. At the beginning, painting was light and shadow—something that might remind us of the formal language of the cinema. Along with the drawing of profiles and composition, Alberti saw the “reception of light”[4] as one of the three components of the art of painting. It is true that Africa has been neglected in this history. And yet, Ndiaye’s project demonstrates that contemporary Dakar can equal Canaletto’s Venice. For it might be the intensity of the equatorial sun in the Sahel that makes the origin of painting African before anything else—painting becomes an “archive of the sun.” And if painting can be defined through the reception of light, then what could be more painterly than the sunlit brightness of the Dark Continent?

-Jana Berankova

(Columbia University, Suture Press)