Curator's Choice: Lovers, guns and African goddesses as Sokari Douglas Camp takes inspiration from Botticelli

This article originally appeared on Culture24.

Taking a leaf from the revisions of Botticelli, Sokari Douglas Camp’s new works breathes life into antique forms, says October Gallery’s Gerard Houghton

"Sokari Douglas Camp moves between painting and sculpture, marking a radical stylistic transition between the two and three-dimensional approaches. She deconstructs and refashions legend in metal materials appropriate to the present age.

From the imprint of her own Kalabari culture, and welding new elements onto the core components, she ‘Africanises’ debate, adding exciting new vistas of wholly contemporary relevance. In context in this first exhibition, the results constitute a stunning tour de force."

The Three Graces

"This small piece is the most faithful reworking of Botticelli’s original as a metal sculpture and demonstrates precisely the kinds of differences involved in moving from two-dimensional paint to metal-work in the round. Examining another major sculpture of the same period, Europe Supported by Africa and America (2015), we recognise elements of the ‘Three Graces’ projected onto an image borrowed from William Blake.

The Abolitionist, Blake’s allegorical etching, presents the white figure of Europe supported by two darker figures personifying the continents of Africa and America. The three figures are barely adorned except for beads, garlands and bracelets. Sokari’s main revision is to clothe these figures in a variety of fabrics that denote the material styles of the different continents.

The inspiration for these changes came from an image of three Nigerian women sumptuously outfitted for a wedding, each wearing a distinctive combination of wrap, bodice and headdress. The subtle implication is that dressing both defines and displays culture.

Botticelli was also aware of the critical importance of clothing. Best-known for his new-born, naked Venus, few realise she is actually on the point of being covered with a sumptuous cloth to hide her nakedness. The only artist whose Judgement of Paris breaks with convention to present Venus, Juno and Athena, not as naked but fully dressed, was Botticelli.

The importance of cloth fabrics in denoting status and wealth is common throughout West Africa, and Kalabari culture puts particular emphasis on its value as the significant vehicle of cultural transmission.

Sokari’s figures dressed in identifying clothing are less vulnerable to misinterpretation than their predecessors, and in her modernised version of the ‘exchange’ that occurs between the three continents, subtle shifts have been introduced to imply that the imbalance and exploitation of former times is at last, finally beginning to be redressed.

In the small steel work, Posing with a Gun (2015), the lone, male figure in contrapposto stance is taken to be Mars rather than Mercury, his long, curved sword having been swapped for a Kalashnikov on a shoulder sling.

In all other respects, the figure reaching up towards the notional trees behind is a fair copy of the Botticelli work."

Lovers Whispering (2016)

"A delightful work that harks back to Whispering Blowing (2015), a sister piece in nickel-plated steel. This impressive piece reprises, in a more gentle form, the interaction between Zephyros and Chloris, the nymph whom he seized and impregnated.

In the Greek myth, retribution was made and the expectant mother honoured as his wife. Yet the promptings of lust still exercise society’s ability to constrain the simmering energies of youthful passion."

Primavera (2015)

"Sokari’s versions of a young man softly blowing his love-song into the ears of the object of his Sketches for Blind Love and Grace (2016) and Primavera charm us precisely because of their restraint.

The asymmetric power of Zephyros swooping on a gust of wind from above has been equalised and, borrowing a leaf from Botticelli’s book, Sokari makes the suitor’s honeyed words figuratively transform into flowery leaves of golden speech. The young woman gently inclining her head to offer an inviting ear suggests her acceptance of his tender whisperings.

In another nuanced association between the lovers and the protective grove where they secretly meet, the young lovers’ headdresses reprise the foliage patterns of the Spring that surrounds them. Love, in any place or time and in any society, should be as sweetly intoxicating as this image suggests, and the golden fruit hanging above their heads implies the ripeness of fulfilment.

Oranges are, traditionally, symbolic of virginity and fertility, but we may also convert these bright perspex shapes into the Food of the Gods by reading them as ripe persimmons.

Mirroring the voluptuous hanging fruit, the repetition of softly rounded shapes - eyes, cheeks, breasts and lips - all promise fruition. The young girl’s half-hidden nipples, traced with delicate finery, display a sensitivity of touch - astonishing in steel - of which Botticelli himself would rightly have been proud.

The Primavera is a virtuoso piece revealing Douglas Camp at her finest. This adaptation of Botticelli’s graceful Flora figure enhances our understanding as to how her descendants might appear in the present day.

This is an energetic African goddess strewing flowers about her with élan. Attired in a heavily embroidered African ‘lace’ robe - itself an exercise in skilful working with a plasma cutter - the rich fabric and gele headdress in which this queen is wrapped are covered in a profusion of metal flowers painted in bright acrylics.

The illusion is almost complete down to the wreath that ornaments the wrap on her head and the garland encircling her neck. But the gaudiest colours among the flowers betray, by their mechanical forms, their less than natural provenance. One gradually distinguishes the toy motorcars lying hidden amongst the flowers, and as soon as the eye notices one imposter, others quickly appear.

Perhaps new cars do represent the flowering tip of our modern technological civilisation. But there’s a deeper note of ecological unease underlying Sokari’s world-view - evident, here, in the erosion of distinction between objects of the natural world and those of unnatural genesis.

If this were a Greek myth, such hybridity, indiscriminately scattered about, would foretell the advent of peculiar fruit and troubling consequences."

• Sokari Douglas Camp: Primavera is at October Gallery, London until May 14 2016.

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Source: http://www.culture24.org.uk/curators-choice/art551375-october-gallery-london-sokari-douglas-camp