Ilídio Candja Candja: Octopus e Miopia
The Energy Behind
Key to Ilídio Candja Candja's solo show Octopus and Myopia is Meditação corporal (Body’s meditation), 2021, an altar located at the further end of the rectangular exhibition space, otherwise filled with about 20 large multicoloured canvases. On a platform on the floor, symmetrically disposed like an arch—or, the artist says, in the shape of a Portuguese caravel, referring to the ones used to transport African slaves for centuries—bricks of soil, clay pots with water, branches, flowers, and candles offer a quiet display for a ritualistic moment of worship. Altars, Candja Candja tells me, are common to every African household. Although they come with the distinctive particularities of each house, tribe, or clan that builds them, they are all passed down from generation to generation through oral lore. The altar honours the ancestors and their land, and acts as a conduit to ask for their guidance and blessings, and to give thanks. “Everything we do is connected to the land”, says Candja Candja, in contrast to most European religious traditions, where worshippers look up to the skies, he notes. The installation in the space is not only a strong reminder of African tradition, it’s also a practical place of reverence and peace.
Above the altar, two of Candja Candja’s abstract mixed-media paintings, Untitled, 2020, and Afrodeezia #1, 2016, hang on a soil-rubbed background. On the latter you can read missa, which could be "mass" in Portuguese—the Christian church service—only the word is missava, or "land", in the artist’s native Changana language, with its last syllable “-va” concealed by smudges on the top right corner of the canvas. Portuguese, the language of the former coloniser, is Mozambique’s official administrative language, but only one of its 43 spoken ones across the territory. The ramifications of the process of decolonisation, including its wars, poverty, and the resulting migration crises, are only worsened by the hostility refugees and immigrants face when they make it to Europe. If we can have empathy for these experiences, and consider their origins in the not-so-distant colonial management of Africa, instead of sweeping these issues under the rug, we can understand that historical injustice affects many people who still carry open wounds today.
Candja Candja believes these can be healed, and he is trying to open some difficult intercultural conversations: issues of racism, colonial past, and slavery. Alas some aren’t ready for those, he laments.
Candja Candja moved to Portugal in 2006, when there was no prospect for him in his own country. He was born in Mozambique in 1976, only a year after the end of a ten-year conflict towards independence from Portugal, and only a year before the eruption of a brutal civil war that further impoverished the country and lasted until 1992. Despite some following economic growth and stability, half the population lives below the poverty line, and recent findings of huge natural gas deposits sparked an ISIS-backed insurgency in the northeast, which is in turn creating, since March 2021, one of the world’s fastest growing displacement crisis. It sounds like a never-ending story of struggle. At the core of Candja Candja’s work is a buoyancy that feeds from a variegated emotional reservoir of hope, frustration, empathy, survival instinct, incomprehension, desire, and love—much of which is expressed through clashing primary and fluorescent colours and blacks, all part of the mixed technique he uses: acrylic, permanent markers, spray, collage, and sometimes oil. “I come from the tropical space, colours represent the present, the movement of all things”, is what he says when I share my visual overwhelm. But in Africa, he explains, people use colours like guns in the face of difficulties. Even during a funeral, a black outfit can be offset with some vibrant pigments, and sadness balanced with dancing and drinking.
In Caminho de volta para casa, yes we can #2 (The way back home), 2016, some of the mixed symbology the artist uses, part personal, part traditionally inspired, supports the heart-breaking theme that is migration. If changing terrain was characteristic to a pre-colonial tribal nomadic life, triggered by a draught for instance, contemporary understanding of displacement is sadly more tragic. But just like in the past, communities turn to their ancestors, either dead (the altar) or alive (the community spiritual leader), to face life’s tribulations. A recurrent four-legged figure populates Candja Candja’s compositions. It represents the archetype of the spiritual leader, the one whose council bears the community’s way of life. Geometrical shapes, such as the triangle, also abound. Through them, the artist alludes to connection—between each other, and between past and present. Then there are the footprints on the canvases, those are either part of the floor painting process, or echo the footsteps of the wayfarers.
In Untitled, 2020, a painting that is mostly green except for a central outburst of mauves, blues, pinks, and reds, and a couple of collaged material, Candja Candja visually alludes to the legacy and the history of African art. The observation is that there isn’t much information about it, besides some anthropological studies. “We don’t have records. It’s all passed through oral tradition, when people die, we lose the information”, he says. On the other hand, what remains through printed documents is an ornamental orchestration that is in itself incomplete. On the top left corner of the canvas is a collaged book-page with a serigraphy of a double-headed eagle—often associated with the idea of empire—representing the old European pyramidal power-structure; and in the lower right side is the erasure on a collaged photography, representing an African statuette, alluding to the loss of information concerning its provenance.
More personal is Memórias e fantasias #4 (Memories and fantasies), 2017, a mostly light blue painting where Candja Candja recorded abstract smudges as emotional expressions of personal memories: a book or a movie that touched him, from either Europe or Africa. On the surface, agitated scratched numbers and words maybe hint to memories of factual events. And dominating the composition, an open window hosts the contours of what looks like a sculpted bust—overseeing it all. Like many painters, Candja Candja starts his creative process by consuming a large amount of visual prompts and images. He likes to immerse himself in what he calls his bible, a visual panorama of ancestral and tribal art, African Art, by Franziska Bolz. He revisits tribal masks and objects to bridge the stories of the past with the present through his own perspective. “I don’t want to copy”, he says, “I want to feel the energy”. I find it interesting that he mentions the energy behind things—and paintings—as that is what ultimately drew me to the work. His abstract compositions, sprinkled with figurative elements, generate a rhythm that I can’t help but appreciate coming from a work of art, despite the loud technique. Their energy is ultimately rather organised, otherwise it would not feel that strong. The paintings also seem to quiet down when they interact with the repository that is the altar. Ultimately, you need to trust Candja Candja's brushstrokes and the movement of it all, so you can engage with an original spirit.
Cristina Sanchez-Kozyreva is an art critic, curator and writer. She is a regular international contributor to art publications such as Artforum, Frieze, Hyperallergic, and other publications including the South China Morning Post. She was the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Hong Kong-based independent art magazine Pipeline that ran print editions form 2011 to 2016 where she curated thematic issues with artists, curators and other art contributors. She has a Masters degree in International Prospective from Paris V University.
Proofreading: Diogo Montenegro.
Ilídio Candja Candja: Octopus e Miopia. Exhibition views. Galeria Quadrum, 2021. Photos: © Bruno Lopes. Courtesy Galerias Municipais/Egeac.