Lift Off embodies Cinga Samson’s unique ability to merge the familiar and mysterious in a figurative practice that celebrates identity and heritage with elaborate painterly assurance. Samson is one of the rising stars in African art, having already been featured in group shows at the Minneapolis Institute of Art and various private museums..
The present work forms part of a pivotal series of introspective self-portraits which sees the young artist shift his focus inward, on the rich texture of his personal experiences. With impeccable detail, yet elusive and imbued with a measure of the spectral, Samson renders himself with an impenetrable, almost ethereal aura. Working from sketches and photographs, Samson’s artistic process merges memory and imagination to create carefully conceived composites of reality and fiction that generate a disconcerting dislocation between subject and background, reminiscent of Italian Renaissance portraiture. Drawing inspiration from disparate art historical sources, ranging from Paul Gauguin to South African artist Peter Clarke, Samson’s elaborate draughtsmanship moreover evokes the dialectic tension between fantasy and precision of Henri Rousseau’s most accomplished works and the compositional intimacy of Kerry James Marshall.
Musee d'Orsay, Paris
Image: © Bridgeman Images
The casually dressed, black male figure holding a white umbrella against an artificial floral background, exudes a quiet confidence against the sombre palette of muted tones that dominate the composition. While commanding a distinct authority with complacent abandon, Samson’s languid figure remains characteristically incomplete, his eyes are removed, completely vacant and expressionless. Instead of eyes, the figure’s glowing, white orbs deliberately refuse to cooperate with the beholder’s gaze, in a striking pictorial gesture meant to create an atmosphere that feels ‘secret, almost holy and distant,’ the artist elaborates (Cinga Samson cited in: ‘Safari Fantasy’, blank projects, June 2017 (online)). A self-imposed sense of vulnerability and anonymity is then juxtaposed to the ostensibly self-assured and casual disposition of the figure, making way for a meditation on the symbolic standing of the black male body in the canon of art history – questioning, confronting and negotiating its positioning in the white dominated visual arena.
"The moon was low and very bright, it was shining on us and reflecting the white of our eyes. It remains such a strong memory that every time I work on a painting, I remember this night. The eyes of my characters remind me of this moonlight; it’s a spiritual reference."
At once firmly asserting and subverting the painterly tradition of figuration, Cinga Samson’s Lift Off weaves together past and present in an idiosyncratic pictorial narrative that offers a complex and nuanced picture of contemporary life, while echoing the loaded spiritual, socio-cultural and symbolic context of his upbringing in the town of Ethembeni in the South African countryside.
