LONDON.- Larkin Durey is presenting Memento Vivere, the artist’s sixth solo exhibition at the gallery.
Marc Padeu works with the tradition of narrative painting, employing the language and stories of the Old Masters and Christianity to depict contemporary Cameroon and the continuing legacy of colonialism.
This new suite of paintings explores the multiplicity of time and the human tendency to behave as if we have the means to control it. Returning to the communities he knows who live and work on the cocoa plantations, Padeu situates his characters within the cycles and seasons of the natural world. Days follow one another, harvests come round again and yet, despite this ebb and flow of life, his figures are caught outside of time, slipping between past, present and future.
Drawing upon Seneca’s writings and the principles of Stoicism, which emphasise living in the present and in tune with nature and Heidegger’s assertion that man only truly becomes himself when he accepts his mortality, Padeu invites us to consider how we might live more fully. This invitation takes us into a different realm of time; the epic tales of the Bible.
The scenes in these paintings are infused with stories older than the people themselves and often enigmatic in meaning. We see men, women and children gathered around a lamb; the lamb of sacrifice that God provided to Abraham to spare the death of Isaac and that John the Baptist pointed to when proclaiming: ‘Behold the Lamb of God”. In other paintings, a man falls to the ground, another lies in the silence of the forest and a young couple emerge hand in hand into the sunshine. In the largest piece, figures gather around a fragile presence, their eyes converging on an invisible centre. Something is being born.
Each painting is poised between promise and fate, light and shade; the figures existing simultaneously in a spiritual and secular realm, neither saints nor heroes but with a growing awareness that life is a fragile gift. The cocoa plantation, painted in blue and purple hues is a divine stage dissolving into foliage as the forest continues to grow, each harvest a reminder that abundance is temporary, each fruit holding the promise of a future generation, every moment a moment worth living.
Padeu studied at the Institute of Fine Arts, the University of Douala, Nkongsamba and lives and works in Yaoundé, Cameroon. His work was included in When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting curated by the late Koyo Kouoh and Tandazani Dhlakama which travelled from Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, South Africa to Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland, BOZAR Brussels, Belgium and Liljevalchs, Stockholm, Sweden. His work has been acquired by the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada and Space K Museum, South Korea.
