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| Goncalo Mabunda - The Messenger - Jack Bell Gallery - April 2018 - Installation View |
Sometimes, we could give to human spirit the opportunity of reconstruction, from heart to mind, the circumstances of societies decay are always against the new perspectives of development of those who only have received, from modernity, a slap without white glove. Africa, always surviving with its bleeding wounds, it has been the constant example of an amplified ambitious; locals and foreigners have applied its own dose into different countries.
Result of an economy of the abuse, many African States have had to manage the unfair living conditions link to historical slavery, racial segregation, poverty and civil war. With few positive results, nothing seems clear in the near future, most of them have not reached a minimum level of development that enables population to arise from and international policy of assistance. On the other hand, it is clear that destruction and its non-trivial ways cannot be solved by art imagery or artistic concepts, but sculptor Goncalo Mabunda does an effort to transform the artefacts of death into traditional symbolisms of power, a sort of scream to find beauty where humans have buried her.
Goncalo Mabunda – Mozambique born 1975, build his sculptures from the war havoc, tools of destruction recycled into masks and thrones, utensils that he convert in the furniture of adoration. No doubt the nature of the material used by the African artist invites the spectator to think over the consequences of armed conflicts, the metal of deactivated bombs and bullets imply the reflection in this way without effort; but his real artwork is not in the sense of the mistakenly called contemporary art, where the reflection/concept/idea is more important than the resulting created object. He has built aesthetically valuable objects.
Even if Mabunda work has elements high profitable for contemporary “art” fanatics, this is: he is African, from a civil war region and recycles artefacts to try to transmute their meaning as a social comment, all of them elements that could position him as an art star; the reality is he gets over this trivial intention. Although his sculptures are rearrangements of other objects, the virtue of Mabunda is the active role in the management of forms and symmetries to create these symbols that remember a time of tribal and conquerors cultures: the thrones. As cult idols of a steampunk society the metal textures of the face sculptures shelter the geometry that defines its formal beauty. This harmonious achievement is the merit of the African sculptor and it is not a minor one.
Goncalo Mabunda is presented in solo exhibition until April 27, 2018 by
Jack Bell Gallery London.
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| Gonçalo Mabunda, Untitled (mask), 2017 |
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| Gonçalo Mabunda, Untitled (mask), 2017 |
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| Gonçalo Mabunda, Untitled (mask), 2017 |
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| Gonçalo Mabunda, Untitled (throne), 2017 |
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| Gonçalo Mabunda, Untitled (throne), 2017 |
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| Gonçalo Mabunda, Untitled (throne), 2017 |
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| Gonçalo Mabunda, Untitled (throne), 2017 |