Goodman Gallery is pleased to present Pelagie Gbaguidi's 'The Colours are the Bark', the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery and in South Africa.

'The Colours are the Bark', brings together a range of works made throughout a number of years, tracing the artist’s extensive oeuvre. Featuring paintings, drawings and mixed media works the show is an exploration of "the big and small stories that take our beings towards the burning questions of the world, urging us to go beyond the surface," says Gbaguidi.

Gbaguidi’s candid and sometimes tongue-in-cheek creations depict splintered figures in different forms and settings - moving, contorting, shapeshifting. As rigorous colour erupts alongside subtle hues, creatures lay next to other creatures, they merge with animal and plant life and other objects, breaking the hard edges between me/us/them/it. 

Often using natural pigments, alongside paint, ink, pencil, wool, wax and crayons and different materials such as flour sacks and tarpaulin, Gbaguidi confronts colonial histories. By repurposing discarded materials and integrating them into new contexts, she questions legacies of colonialism that continue to impact migration, trade, and the environment.

Through a self-reflexive frame, using her own experiences as a setting off point, Gbaguidi considers how history impacts the banal aspects of daily life alongside the trajectory of human connection. Her practice, phenomenological and embodied, involves a performative element where the body serves as a medium. She often uses own body to paint and make marks on the surfaces (instead of brushes or other tools). These scratches and smudges become imprints that allow the work to absorb memory into form, she explains; "thus, the body becomes a language that translates sociopolitical issues into a poetic choreography composed of paintings, drawings and textiles...."

Engaging with (while simultaneously breaking away from) tradition, Gbaguidi confronts histories of oppression, particularly through women's experiences, exposing how history, (un)recorded and remembered, continues to impact on women's lives. Her practice can be understood through several key thematic threads —assemblage, fragmentation and intersections reflected through a focus on the female body; how the body is encountered and read, alongside its relationship with the environment, in a technological age. Seeing herself as a modern day griot and carrying on a long tradition of lyrical storytelling she engages in transgenerational and intercontinental dialogue, particularly between her birth place in West Africa and Europe. 

Embracing colour as a language and mediator, Gbaguidi embraces various palettes including reds, browns, greens, blues, yellows and at times a significant amount of white to draw attention to empty space. In ‘Le jour se leve: The Mutants’, a work rendered in acrylic and pigment, Gbaguidi explores intersections of identity and body politics, casting an enquiring eye to secular feminism through the female form. The notion of curvature and waves (as seen in her ‘Care’ series) is an important aspect of her visual language. She reflects on these undulating marks as "waves of life", encompassing the flow of interactions, relationships and encounters between people and their environment.

Often using titles as provocations, Gbaguidi teases out more complex questions through satirical and bold phrases; ‘Who did I sell my scalp to? Disconnection’, or ‘Pourquoi je ne bande plus dit le vieil homme à son médecin’, translating to ‘Why am I no longer hard, said the old man to his doctor’. This work is exemplary of the artist's ability to weave together stories of varying depth and significance that fold into inquiries of the human condition. 

Much of Gbaguidi’s practice is collaborative and communal. Gbaguidi’s multilayered practice is grounded in impassioned responses to injustice, oppression, disconnection and trauma while also dreaming up new ways through which the body can move towards liberation.