Exhibition of the Week: Quitte le Pouvier: New Paintings by Aboudia, Jack Bell Gallery, London SW1
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Your support makes all the difference.Still only 30, the Ivory Coast artist Aboudia has been compared to Jean-Michel Basquiat, which is fair. The power of these paintings hits you as soon as you walk in the gallery.
Like Basquiat, Aboudia combines text with image, responding to political injustice with fury expressed through colour and line. Djassa (2012) shows stick figures with electrified expressions, their eyes black whirlpools of paint. One face is fitted with a gas-mask; hair stands on end in a cartoonish state of shock. His art does not depend on Western aesthetic influence, nor can be patronisingly dismissed as "folk," or worse, "primitive".
Abstraction here becomes a weapon. The thick, dark outlines of Art Nouchy (2012) are grounded in Ivoran street art, or Nouchy, which Aboudia has described as "children's style" graffiti. It is a medium through which the people of his country can "[pass] a message through me". This is a raw yet controlled brilliance.
(020 7930 8999; jackbellgallery.com) to 16 Feb
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