05 may 2023, Flor Linckens
The fragmented worlds of Raymond Fuyana
Until 14 May, Duende Art Projects in Antwerp is presenting a solo exhibition by the young Zimbabwean artist Raymond Fuyana, his European debut. His visually beautiful dreamscapes are imbued with symbolism and are marked by a unique combination of realism and surrealism. They also reflect his worldview as a deaf artist. Fuyana was trained as a print maker but has since expanded his practice to include colourful oil paintings.
Raymond Fuyana, Mangwe, 2023, Duende Art Projects
When Surrealism emerged about a hundred years ago, it was an important means of dealing with a world that had rapidly changed due to technological developments and a devastating war that had decimated and traumatised a generation of young people. It was a form of resistance against a repressive, rational society that desperately clung to rigid social rules that hardly seemed logical after such a war. The surrealists within art and literature sought the possibilities of the subconscious instead, building on the work of Sigmund Freud. The roots of the movement can be found in the 1910s, but under the leadership of poet André Breton, it officially took shape in 1924. The imaginative power of this personal world of the mind turned out to be unprecedented and resulted in surprising and absurd new images and texts. The fact that now, a hundred years later, we have quite a limited view of the variety within the movement became apparent during the last Venice Biennale, which similarly took place after a historic period. The Italian curator Cecilia Alemani named the main exhibition of the 59th edition 'The Milk of Dreams', after the surrealistic children's book of the same name by painter and author Leonora Carrington (1917-2011). Surrealism functioned as a common thread through the exhibition, with a particular emphasis on artists who have been assigned a marginal role in the art-historical canon, for example because of their gender or geographical location. It showed how important it is to showcase a wider range of artists and perspectives.
Raymond Fuyana, Yellow Love, 2022, Duende Art Projects
Raymond Fuyana builds on this art-historical tradition and creates alternative and fragmented worlds in which time becomes an abstraction and the past, present and future converge. The artist's memories, experiences and dreams play a central role in his paintings. We see symbolic elements such as dining chairs that lack any sense of functionality, a shoe with a plant growing out of it and parts of games such as a football field and chess pieces. Fuyana also adds elements of European architecture, including ancient ruins and modernist or cube-like buildings — which in themselves seem to defy gravity — as well as the arches of fascist architecture such as the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana in Rome. Fuyana then combines this with African landscapes and acacia trees, whose greenery occasionally seems to float independently in space. He contrasts two different continents, but also spheres: the interior versus the exterior and the city versus the village. The artist also hopes to emphasise the fragile state of our ecosystem and the fact that we, as humans, need to care for our planet.
Central in the works is a young, black figure, partially turned away from the viewer. Sometimes decapitated, other times with one leg in a painting. Often he sits on a lounge chair or sofa, merely observing the world around him. It reflects the ways in which the artist sometimes feels isolated from his environment, which is mainly geared towards hearing people.
Raymond Fuyana, Bulilima Mangwe III, 2022, Duende Art Projects
