Upon arriving in New York, Burundi-born, South Africa-based artist Serge Alain Nitegeka visited the Jeff Koons retrospective at the Whitney and immediately felt inspired: “I went to the studio and for the next three weeks that followed, I worked like a madman, and I never felt tired,” he said. “My wife was worried that I had taken on too much. It’s like, ‘Yeah, you’re right, I’ve never made so much work in three weeks before — this is a first!’” It’s perhaps a surprising reaction — not only because the exhibition tended to elicit some not-so-subtle cynicism from locals, but because Nitegeka’s work doesn’t necessarily feel shiny or whimsical. Displaced from Burundi by civil war at age 11, then again from Rwanda by genocide soon after, Nitegeka translates his experience into stark geometric works, black, white, and red in brief spurts, foregrounding the unvarnished pine of shipping crates to comment on forced migration — unwilling human movement across borders.The paintings currently on view at Marianne Boesky’s downtown space, Boesky East, for example, are based on the installation Nitegeka presented with the gallery at last year’s Armory Show. That exhibition, “Barricade I,” was composed of crisscrossing black beams that cut through the booth at all angles, with a few human-sized shipping crates laid across them, hanging midair like ominous fruit. The paintings seem to reduce “Barricade”s complex spatial interplay into neatly rendered color blocks — thick black lines slice his pine canvases diagonally, while unpainted oblong shapes stand in for the crates.“It’s like an extension of that ephemeral, temporary installation to something more permanent that carries on and asks different questions in terms of art practice,” Nitegeka said. With the installation, he said, “you can walk through, you can feel the weight of the beams, the sculpture around you. There’s a sense of being in a different place. Whereas we stand here, looking at the paintings on the wall, the same installation on the wall, and we’re kind of distanced.”This distance may seem questionable at first; the sculpture’s implicit “politics of body and space and movement,” as Nitegeka termed it, feels particularly important in conveying his message to viewers who have to hunch in and through the work. “I simulate the situations that I’ve been in, and then I abstract it in a way to pose it for the viewer to feel mostly the same way,” he said. So what might aestheticizing that experience mean?“As you’ve seen with the refugees, people are displaced, and they exist in temporary spaces — the stadiums, the churches,” he said. “That’s where they figure out how to negotiate space, in the sense of, where do you choose to put the bedding, put the belongings.” And perhaps it’s this small, self-imposed order that’s mirrored in the rigid color-blocking of his canvases. “Why the straight lines? Why such control of paint? It’s exactly that — the kind of psychological control over materials that you use. It’s all straight, logical, simple, direct, pre-planned. There is that kind of flipping around of an experience to counter it in a way—bringing structure into chaos.”“Whatever we deem permanent now might not be permanent tomorrow,” he added, noting that his art practice is always open to new yet untold directions — for example, his recently completed first-ever video work, “BLACKSUBJECTS.” And his concerns today, he said, are pretty much immediate: “Come to the interview, work in the studio, enjoy the cold.”And as for the future, though uncertain, Nitegeka’s may well involve even more temporariness of place: “I’ve thought about moving from town to town, rent a space for like two months. Not like a residency, someone inviting you — I just want to go and work, you know?” he said, referencing that electricity he got from the Koons show. “Get some paper, get some charcoal, mess around, get the vibes. ‘The migrant artist,’ quite literally.”
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