Reconstructing Memory

Marcel Pinas and George Struikelblok are part of a new generation of artists throughout the Caribbean, such as Caroline Sardine of St Vincent, who have recently returned to their native islands, after a period of study at the Edna Manley School of the Arts in Kingston. They are both painters and work collaboratively. They are both involved in the process of reconstructing loss or memory. However, it should be stated that this process is not about the nostalgia or pathos seen in our traditional art galleries. Painting is the medium through which they conduct an investigation of or negotiation with their respective pasts towards a future.

Both of these artist have also came up through the ranks of the renowned Nola Hatterman Art Academy and would have grown up looking at the work well known figures such as Erwin De Vries and Soeki Irodikromo in Paramaribo.

The Interior
For Pinas, it is his childhood in the legendary Maroon interior of the country that is navigated. As a child he was brought out to the coast by his mother, as many of his generation had to be taken over or escaped to Cayenne to safety during the civil war. A journey up river from Moengo unravels as a story not only of loss and devastation, but also of pride and continuity and hope. The artist has been collecting fragments of the famous facades or canoes from these areas where he grew up and bringing them back to his studio in Paramaribo to be transformed into parts of his own visual vocabulary. To the artist this is a world of possibility and new beginnings, using things from the foundation of his cultural origins. The actual objects are then reconstructed or incorporated, as in his paintings, which use the Maroon language.

“Basically this body of work is about past experiences”, Pinas says in a published statement. “It deals with the destruction of the Ndjuka culture in Suriname. In these works, I have expressed that situation, paying attention to the protection of cultures in general. I have focused on the Ndjuka because I originate from the Ndjuka in Suriname.”
Ndjuka is an English-based creole of Suriname spoken since the 18th century by Maroons in Eastern parts of the country. It has been said that it is related to Sranan, from West Africa and that speakers of both languages can communicate to a limited degree. Ndjuka is said to be distinctive as it has its own syllabic writing developed by its speakers.

“The symbols used in my works are motifs used by the Ndjuka in their carving. It is a tradition to decorate the tools or objects used by these people, for example, doors, dishes, and stools. Decorating these objects not only beautifies them, but is also a communication tool (without words) for a beloved person. Other motifs used are symbols out of the Afaka script”.

Pinas’ work is hung or suspended un-stretched, bringing to mind its status as a painted object. Paint sits directly and very much on the surface of the canvas as an arrangement of marks and fields of colour combined with fragments of patterns from quilted material either inscribed or attached to the surface. This suggests that the canvas is an arena or a domain upon which the artist arranges and processes inferences. He has no particular interest in pictorialism. The fairly consistent vertical composition refers to his interest in totems.

“Totems have different meanings in Ndjuka culture. Some use totems as a protection at the entrance of the village, to protect the village from negative influences from the outside world. Others use totems for ritual or cultural purposes. For example, to communicate with their ancestors. At most important events, the ancestors are consulted and offers of food and drinks are made to them.”
So what can appear to be open ended expressive or gestural and random markings on flat or lightly modulated fields of colour carries specific meanings to the artist.

Love and Death
For George Struikelblok, of Asian descent and also from an Islamic background, it is an imagined father figure of whom he has no memory that keeps coming up on the surface of his canvases and objects. It represents a broken link that is both a personal and cultural one. His father fell to his death from a fruit tree before he was born leaving his mother to become homeless moving from place to place dependent on tolerant relatives and friends. George’s mother eventually met someone else from whom the artist got his surname but by the time he was two years of age that person had also died. He has no photographic record of his father or this person. George then had to find his way. Two ghost like figures haunt most of his images as he tries to reconstruct these absences, this confusion and sense of lost or conflicted sense of belonging to his larger family and roots. So the idea of the missing father and the missing culture coincides in the investigations of these two artists.
“ contemplating about love, I came to my early years without my father whom I never saw…he died before I was born...these works express my emotions of loving and missing him in my life… the blank upside down figure is my father…the bright colours express the freedom of love for him…the ladders represent some kind of communication between us…”. The artist is now also a father and creates and also experiences that which he yearned for and expresses in his work.

Both artists must build their own worlds and ways through the world. They both began as painters but are now both building constructions with fragments from the world around them…for George this is the bits of corrugated metal sheeting and wood inferring the gates or fences and the materials used in humble everyday dwellings. His works are self supported constructions that can be either hung or leaned on the wall.

The work in terms of scale and use of medium and colour can also be interpreted to be juggling the investigations of the CoBrA group. A mid-twentieth century European movement in which the spontaneous and direct use of bright colour looked toward the “intuitive” rather than the formalistic. One can also notice the influence of people such as Cecil Cooper and Rex Dixon under whom they studied in Kingston. This is hybrid work processing and arranging available elements. These associations indicate the particular journey of both artists and the syncretic enterprise that so defines their work.

Marcel Pinas, born in 1971, comes from the Marowijne District of Suriname.

George Struikelblok, born 1973, Paramaribo.