Terrible inhumanity - I feel it strongly, also due to my many happy childhood and later good memories of my time in Nice. Fanaticism is abhorrent.
 This extraordinary painting by Jonas Profil immediately evokes analogical dreamscapes. This specific image brings to mind a number of questions. Who are these people, tightly bound by a circular barrier? Why do they all have long necks? Has this vast crowd been brought together of their own volition, or has some power put them in this restricted space? The title of the painting helps: All in the Same Basket. This painting is an image of nothing less than the human condition – we’re all in it together, surrounded by the limiting barrier which brings us as one in our existence, and at the same time isolates us from everything else, including other forms of life. And the long necks suggest that we are capable of being self-aware, an awareness which extends beyond our bodies. Painting vast crowds presents the artist with a considerable technical problem: how detailed does each person in the crowd need to be? How does one deal with representing people becoming progressively smaller as they extend so far into the distance, merging their continuously changing sizes, in the foreground, middle-ground and background figures, so that the depiction avoids visual incoherence? The colourful Haïtian clothes help Jonas Profil solve this technical problem. His painterly and astonishingly fine detail and clever geometries achieve a virtuosic solution.  Migration.
In this painting we see another dreamlike vision, which on closer examination takes on the characteristics of a nightmare. A chaotic mass of people, a living human cargo, are carelessly thrown together in this gigantic, but fragile wheelbarrow. And then, scattered on the sea, there are even more precarious matchboxes, full of exiles. The dim pastel colours suggest an undefined future: a better life? Or a catastrophe? Here families and friends are torn apart: relatives leave relatives, friends leave friends. Society becomes atomised in the misty hardly visible waters that provide the dangerous transitions to other lives in other countries. Some faces can be seen, but there are also the faceless, anonymous but sizeably powerful figures of those who profit from the misery of others, whose own migration is towards wealth, getting rich on the despair and hope of those who are desperate to leave. The traffickers don’t care about the loss of life involved in these migrations: there will always be others who will be paying them, as long as the living conditions of the majority remain appalling. Jonas Profil is Makenol Profil’s uncle and teacher. I explored two of Makenol Profil’s paintings earlier, on the 16th April, 2016. These excellent Haïtian painters are represented by www.facebook.com/thesmartestproject |