The paintings by Australian artist Zaide Harker, created during his month-long residency in Lagos, work on two levels: pictorial expression and narrative purpose.

On the first level, the combination of three pictorial gestures creates a complex quality of emotional reality. On one level, we can appreciate the linear treatment of colors and shapes that structurally support the scene. On another level, the gestures of washed-out and mixed colors on the canvas reveal the artist's energy, rejecting traditional representation and pictorial treatment, using paint almost as a “record” of an act. And on the third level, the pictorial materiality, with thick brushstrokes of paint, reveals the tactile intentionality in the projection of a sculptural exploration.

This multiplicity of elements underpins the intricate narrative mood. On the surface, there is the hybridization of animals and people, as a state of communication in which people can assign themselves the figure of an animal, revealing the beauty of the strangeness hidden in personality, as if it were a mask. It can also be interpreted as the mixing of species, which can be read in the context of the ideas of feminist philosopher and biologist Donna Haraway, who addresses hybridization and interspecies relationships, in which bonds of communication, affection, training, and shared responsibility are established. The presence of animal heads with human bodies can also be symbolized as a morbid or amusing part of all the possibilities that social segregation does not allow, whether it be a disability, as in the case of the artist with Huntington's disease, or the queer world that is increasingly present in everyday global life.

olgaMargarita dávila
Chief curator

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