From February 22 to March 24, 2024 Dennis de Caires’s collection of recently completed paintings showed at the Barbados Museum & Historical Society in the exhibition titled “Wuh Part You Is?” Characteristic of De Caires’s oeuvre, the paintings which are vibrantly polychromatic evidence a love of and a preoccupation with colour. These are not the paintings of a London-trained artist whose sense of colour is harnessed, restrained, and tamed by the perennial grey of those skies. Nor are they the paintings of a re-transplanted Londoner trying to break from those restraints. No! These are the paintings of an artist who revels in the exuberant colour of gardens in a London springtime; colour under tropical equatorial light; and the energetic, rhythmic and psychic possibilities of colour.
While the paintings of “Wuh Part You Is?” seem to have a reference point of riotous garden blooms, still-life is the basis for discourse with the compositional tendencies of European Modernism. In De Caires’ collection, there are wonderful echoes of Matisse, Picasso, and Van Gogh punctuated by bananas, mangoes, and the occasional pineapple or floral arrangement in a glass or ceramic container. Meanwhile, the spaces around the still-lifes are activated with patterns that evoke the Caribbean’s visual and auditory rhythms. The result is that the still-lifes are subordinated within the composition as the eye must move across the surfaces to experience the spaces and sensations proposed.
Dennis de Caires was born here in Georgetown in 1957. In 1970, he migrated to England with his family. He studied at Medway College of Art; Winchester School of Art; Cité Des Arts Internationale, Paris (one term while at the RCA); and the Royal College of Art (RCA), London. He has lived and worked in England, France, and Barbados, where he is currently based. Starting in November 2009, he hosted Pictures for Georgetown 1986-2009 at the National Gallery of Art Castellani House.
In an interview with Barbadian artist Juliana Inniss printed in the “Wuh Part You Is?” exhibition catalogue, De Caires offers valuable insight into his use of colour, pattern, and image making. Following are excerpts from that interview, strung together:
“I’ve come to see my high key palette originating from three elements, the first two relating to where I was born and how I was brought up in Guyana. I’ve become more convinced – studying the work of the Guyanese artist Philip Moore and the Venezuelan Armando Reveron – that geographical location has a critical affect [sic] on the work of visual artists working outside of established cultural centres. Born, almost, on the Equator gives an exposure to colour in the natural world that can often be intense and overwhelming for the senses; in sky, landscape, animals, plants and trees.
“My use of pattern, especially that surrounding the objects in my paintings, serves several purposes. Originally intended to disrupt any tendency toward a narrative reading of my images I tried to establish a field of colour across all of the painting that would encourage the scanning of every area of the work – no one part being given greater importance or hierarchical significance. The space between the objects, that nothingness, became equally important. Pattern also serves to establish sound in my work and I want to make the viewer hear something when looking.
“[As] a student of art I spend much of my life looking at and studying art. I have an endless list of artists from whom I have learnt and [derived] immense pleasure and informed what I might, or might not, make. I rely on several artists who remain important to my practice for the ways in which they make me think of what might be possible in painting (Frank Bowling, Estelle Thompson and Stanley Greaves stand out).
“Our lives in the Caribbean are embedded in sound and I doubt anyone would characterise my work as being quiet. My use of pattern across the whole painting can disrupt the pictorial plane to create a dissonance for the viewer which hopefully elicits sound. I sometimes include words and numbers as a simple contrivance to make people say it in their heads; read it, say it. I do try to keep other areas that are ‘quieter’ to modulate the overall ‘sound’.
“Philip Moore’s use of colour is related to the individual marks made by the tools he used to apply the paint, presenting colour in small areas to be blended on the viewer’s retina. This also serves to create an energy – almost electrical but certainly cosmic – in his painting, encouraging viewers to constantly scan the image with each area of colour distinct but connected to the whole. In Frank’s paintings (and of course I’m making sweeping statements here simply to make the comparison between the two) I think his colour is more directly informed by an idea of how colour, in itself, might operate in painting. As with Philip, how the paint is applied is critical and the gesture, action and process of its application to the canvas suggests, for me, references to the natural and physical world. The way in which he manipulates paint and orchestrates chance gives the viewer insight into a bigger world. Both artists have been important for me as personal heroes in showing that a Guyanese artist could aspire to make paintings in a serious and sustained way. Not quite as banal and straightforward as it first sounds – critics and curators from outside the region seem to have little grasp of the profoundly different realities and contexts of working in the Caribbean compared, say, to contemporaneous North American and European models. Philip and Frank are just two of many major artists to have come out of the Anglo-Caribbean in the last century but they are the two who have impacted me directly in terms of providing role models for negotiating this chasm.
“The exercise of making paintings is, for me, an undertaking that requires hours, days, weeks and years of focus.
But I’m perfectly happy if they appear to take two minutes to make.”
To stand in the midst of this body of work would have been a treat! There is so much to delight in these paintings as images that one cannot help but wish the forecasted ferry from Barbados to Guyana was already in place to allow a trip across the waters just to savour the physical presence of these beauties. I, we can only hope that de Caires’s desire to show this body of work in Guyana comes to fruition soon.
