Kendell Geers Petals of Blood 596, 2019 Acrylic on canvas Work: 100 x 70 cm
The title of these paintings by Kendell Geers quotes a book by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, a landmark writer of postcolonial African literature. Thiong’o’s writing calls into question the ability to decolonise our minds if we are speaking (and thinking) with the tongue of the coloniser. For Geers, art should be rooted in personal experience that gives the language an accent that liberates the work from the imposition of power relations that are not in favour of the subject.
The paintings in the “Petals of Blood″ series are coupled with another series called “Les Fleurs du Mal” which quotes the banned book of poems by Baudelaire that launched the Modernist era in Paris. The still life paintings are inspired by the photographic series “Garden of Earthly Delights.” The blossoms look like scars, wounds, bullet holes or the Corona virus and appear to be bleeding, reflecting humanity’s tenuous connection to nature and our ecology, replacing historic respect given to our environment with violence.
