Ghana A Nubian Landscape

The new series of paintings by Gideon Appah features figures in positions of leisure and depictions of rituals in areas where land and sky meet. He abandons the city scenes to create a world where romance is radical, a world made of mystery. The artist’s figurative compositions are taken from newspaper clippings, entertainment posters, and films produced between the 50s and the 80s to explore the rise and fall of Ghanian cinema and leisure culture, always adding his own artistic imagination to the mix. In the most recent works, Appah manifests a new desire to paint atmospheric elements, particularly clouds and stars, as backgrounds to his poetic narrative. While pondering ways of painting new skies, mountains, rivers, and hills, we observe the artist’s transition from a recurrent use of a nostalgic blue, which permeated most of his compositions until date, to a strong red never used before. Appah’s visual poetry remains a dedication to love; Gideon’s characters are captured in bucolic views expressing this sentiment through their intimate bodily motions and a strong sense of fragility that perpetuate the artist’s long-standing eulogy to love and sentimentality.