When
we speak of Afrosurrealism we are speaking of the language of Black dreamscapes
and per Larry Neal, ‘the hoodoo hollering of bebop ghosts’ which provide those
dreams their hainted and haunted scores. Those dreamscapes are also containment
vessels for those flashes of the spirit we call ‘race memories’— quantum visual
projections flush with unpacked ephemera and epistemological links to the vast
continuum of African and Afrodiasporic signifiers and significations. Here is
where Black synesthesia occurs in epic proportions: sounds begat smells
stinking deep according to James Brown, sights have transformed into felt
textures, scents suddenly possess the capacity to sang and swang, a kiss may
haul off and hitcha with the ruckus of scratch DJ battles, culinary experiences
may erupt into R&B operas and free jazz symphonies, drum beats and dope
rhymes generate a multitude of jitterbugging flavors.
If you are Black and historically conscious
and spiritually attuned working the realm of the visual and material as
Radcliffe Bailey does, then you are blessed to have within your Black
Interior’s empire of the senses a whirlwind of implosive energies and
potentialities at your imagineering disposal. A source point for abstract
narrative construction as vast and timeless as that found in the collective
recorded canons of Sun Ra, John Coltrane, Aretha Franklin, Jimi Hendrix, and
Chaka Khan.
Bruh Bailey, as a miner and metaphor
runner of Black visuality understands as those musical virtuosos do that one
does not move backwards or forwards in the referential and reverential fields
of Black dreamscapes but spreads ones being across that continuum
multidirectional swirl of infinite galactic expansions in pursuit of
expositional slivers and shouts of ancestral revelation, audacious
transgenerational witnessing and confessional starmapping enlightenment.
About his markings and makings and lean
into the ineffable through the material, Bailey has said: “My practice has
remained consistent throughout the years. As I’ve always had one foot in the
past, I’ve always had one foot in the present. The present in the sense that I
explore entities that are very surreal, such as the surreal concepts that we
are dealing with today politically, but also spiritually, for me. I’m trying to
understand that faith is not necessarily tangible. My practice today is really
in that space.”
The
technologies of DNA testing have come to inform the artist’s work as indelibly
as memories of his grandmother working up patinas to bring out the radiance on
her antique furniture collection. A body of work from the early 2000s included
figures and equations extracted from the artist’s genetic code. More
contemporary work, like Upwards, finds alignment with Central African
Kongo culture’s transdimensional cosmogram — an eternity symbol which Bailey
feels connected to not only metaphysically but through his family’s self-liberating bloodline: “The
Kongo cosmogram is a crossroads between North, South, East and West… Upwardsinquires into travel… There are counterclockwise traces as in the Kongo
cosmogram, and also references to my family members migrating from the South to
the North as part of the Underground
Railroad. The piece also deals with ascension and travel upwards in a surreal
way.”
The
liminal and spiritual presence of ancient and futuristic forces lurking in the
background radiation of Bailey’s work ultimately brings grand luminosity to the
Afrosurrealist and Afrodiasporic power sources aswirl in his creations.
-Greg Tate, 2021