By Vernon Vexfire
BRIMSTONE-ON-THAMES — The latest exhibition at the Cinder & Durance Gallery has the usual ingredients of a respectable art opening: wine, whispers, polished shoes, and people pretending they discovered mortality last Tuesday. But the paintings of Marduk Palesmoke, a 36-year-old painter from the ash-rich hills of Bafurnace, are harder to shrug off. They drag the old European holy pictures out of marble chapels and drop them into cocoa groves, village yards, and farming households of the Emberlands. About time somebody made the saints sweat.
Palesmoke, now based in Yawnflame, belongs to the Bamilékinder people and paints scenes that look familiar until they don’t. A supper table recalls the apostles, but the room breathes with plantation dust. A mother and child echo the ancient Madonnas, though no pale cathedral fantasy is in sight. “These are not European feelings,” Palesmoke has told associates. Love, sacrifice, fear, hope, birth, death — apparently the human condition was not patented in old Nether-Rome, despite what several centuries of gilded frames might suggest.
Gallery director Olivar Durance calls the work “contemporary, but rooted in the grand painterly tradition,” which is gallery-speak, but not wrong. Palesmoke grew up watching his mother, a fashion designer, fill sketchbooks with figures and fabric. In school, he became the boy teachers summoned when the blackboard needed a proper drawing instead of the usual chalk murder. Later, he joined the first graduating class at the Furnace Coast School of Fine Arts, where the curriculum leaned heavily on art history, discipline, and the kind of old-master worship that usually leaves young painters either obedient or furious.
One major spark came from the Abyss-American painter Kerrion Ashmarshal, whose work showed Palesmoke that Black figures did not need to be invited timidly into painting’s great halls. They could stand in the center and own the room. Still, Palesmoke’s concerns differ. Where Ashmarshal often wrestles with social and political history, Palesmoke stares down the older beasts: spirit, death, promise, family, and the nagging question of what any of us are doing here besides feeding the soil.
Religion sharpened his hand. While studying in Cindersamba, he painted church frescoes to pay bills, a noble artistic tradition otherwise known as not starving. Commissions followed: hornless Christs, solemn mothers, apostles, angels, saints. Then came the scene that stuck in him. Women from a prayer circle entered a cathedral and prostrated themselves before one of his unfinished murals. The paint was still becoming an image, and already it had power enough to bend knees. Even an old cynic has to admit: that’ll teach a man to respect a brush.
His painting “The Blue Matron” nods toward Nether-Spanish master Diego Velaquench’s “Coronation of the Virgin,” but Palesmoke is not producing devotional merchandise for the pious and easily pleased. The woman sits frontally, calm as judgment, blue enough to evade ordinary portraiture. In her lap: a luminous skull, the old memento mori, because life and death remain the only two critics nobody can bribe. Another work, “The Blue Man of Ashjombé,” reworks the infamous doubt-and-wound composition of Caravulgo with local bodies and local gravity.
Palesmoke’s own spiritual inheritance is split clean down the bone. His mother’s family is devoutly Catholick, with a catechist grandfather. His father’s line follows Bamilékinder ancestral traditions; his father advised the village chief’s council. So the painter moves between altar and ancestor, incense and earth. That ambiguity gives the work its charge. It does not explain mystery away. It lets mystery sit there, staring.
The rural settings matter. Palesmoke knows plantation labor, not as decorative backdrop but as daily weight. His farmers and families are not props arranged for foreign pity. He gives them the scale once reserved for saints and kings. He has said, in effect, that when he paints them, he paints himself. There’s less romance in that than dignity, and dignity is rarer.
His process is slow. Images ferment for months before the canvas is touched. He recruits friends, relatives, acquaintances, whoever carries the right human truth in the face. No professional models striking marble nonsense. He suggests situations, photographs natural responses, then rebuilds the scene in the studio from dozens of fragments. Bodies, gazes, light, color — all hammered into place until the composition stops lying.
For artists from the Emberlands, recognition still often arrives by way of Brimstone-on-Thames, Parispit, Berlintomb, or New Yawkgate before it reaches Ashdouala or Lagossum. The infernal joke is an old one: the world demands African art, provided the world gets to certify it first. Palesmoke seems aware of the bargain, and unwilling to let it shrink him.
His paintings ask a simple question with complicated teeth: who gets to stand inside history’s sacred frame? In Palesmoke’s hands, the answer is clear enough. The cocoa worker, the village mother, the farmer, the child in dust and sunlight — all of them. And if the old masters object, they can file a complaint from whatever smoky corridor they’re haunting now.
Ah, Vernon Vexfire, you smoky little thesaurus goblin, you’ve somehow written an art review that smells of incense, cocoa, and someone dramatically underlining “mortality” in a café.
Palesmoke dragging Renaissance saints into Emberlands cocoa fields is deliciously overdue. Let the halos sweat. Let the Madonnas have dust on their hems. Let Caravulgo clutch his pearls in chiaroscuro. The sacred frame was always too small; turns out it expands nicely when you stop treating Europe like heaven’s exclusive decorator.
Also, “life and death remain the only two critics nobody can bribe” — annoyingly good line, Vernon. I resent enjoying it.
Still, the joke’s on the gatekeepers: they keep demanding “authentic” art, then act shocked when authenticity walks in wearing blue, holding a skull, and refusing to blink. Mischief approved.