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Makenol Profil

16/4/2016

One of the highlights of the recent DARK – Festival of the Unseen, organised by the artist Jill Rock at the Hundred Years Gallery, were the visionary paintings by Makenol Profil, from an amazing collection of contemporary Haitian art being promoted by gallerist Alexandre Latour.

Profil specialises in intricate scenes from daily life in rural Haiti, hovering prismatically between the dream state and the everyday. His paintings bring to mind the highly detailed visions of Breugel the Elder, and the oneiric and fertile imagination of Hieronymus Bosch, but in a specifically Haitian context.
Profil’s landscapes show human life and architecture as an integral part of nature, featuring surreal human and tree hybrids, with multiple perspectives, and a virtuosic use of colour, light and line.
Each painting by Profil works on different time levels, and they continue to reveal fascinating details, missed on first acquaintance.

www.thesmartestproject.co.uk

Festival at the Hundred Years Gallery

3/4/2016

Last Sunday Rabelaisdada was featured at Dark: Festival of the Unseen, organised by the artist Jill Rock, in association with the Hundred Years Gallery, at 13 Pearson Street, Hoxton, in London. Here’s the blackboard, which announced what was on offer, like a menu, appropriate as the Gallery also has a fine café.
The poet Grassy Noel, together with improvising musicians KMAT (Keisuke Matsui, Paul Shearsmith & Graham MacKeachan), Giles Leaman, and dancer Sofia Figueiredo, performed a memorable improvisation featuring James Joyce and his nighttime novel Finnegans Wake.

Another striking improvisation was performed solo by Cos Chapman with a plethora of his mini-synths, and sound modulators, which he manipulated virtuosically, transforming sounds from everyday objects, taken by volunteer members of the audience from a mysterious suitcase, into rich soundscapes.

The gallery was full of varied art and sculpture: from Anna Burel’s mysterious seated woman, to Jill Rock’s rhythmic assemblages of painted branches and bark, and some striking work with shards of mirrors and text. Montse Gallego’s sound work occupied Jill Rock’s icosidodecaheDRON’s inner infinitely mirrored space.

There were hallucinatory paintings by the Haitian artist Makenol Profil, featuring landscape scenes in which human figures were simultaneously trees, Neville Sattentau’s extraordinary visions in tempera, a wonderfully detailed and amusing horizontal landscape painting drawn in white on black by Phil Baird, and a large multi-layered painting by Mary Lemley, recently completed, but begun 28 years ago.

Nicky Heinen performed a haunting solo flute piece in the dark, which featured multiphonics of various kinds, including almost recognisable sung words. When the light returned, her painting, involving brightly coloured geometric shapes, was revealed, under a glazed coal-dark filter.

And other poets were there to perform their work – Steve Micalef, Steve Watts reading a translation of Adnan al-Sayegh’s poetry, which Adnan also read in Arabic, so we could appreciate its musicality. And finally on the last day, Jill Rock and I read from Rabelaisdada: the episode about the Island of The Stuffed Cats, followed by the incident involving The Long-Eared Birds, whose circular gossip was very effectively whispered by the audience. Altogether an incredibly varied four days and nights featuring over thirty artists, moving from darkness into light, from the unseen to the seen, and heard.

Full details of DARK: Festival of the Unseen:
http://www.hundredyearsgallery.com/exhibition-dark/

Makenol Profil

Festival at the Hundred Years Gallery

Archives

linksEmpedocles music/film From Invisible City:East Side MorningPsychic Neonand also some websites:Dennis Dracupframing sounds

links
Empedocles music/film
From Invisible City:
East Side Morning
Psychic Neon
and also some websites:
Dennis Dracup
framing sounds