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KENFE MICHAEL BETHE SELASSIE
A Romantic Artist
Kenfe Michael moved to France to study science after completing his studies in the Lycee Guebre Maryam in Addis Ababa. He had to wait until his 30th birthday to get to his exciting vocation. The proverb says, "one finds what one looks for," and Kenfe Michael wanted to be an artist. That he is now, a celebrated and original one. Given the centrality in social science of the concept of human development, an accumulation of culture may seem self-evident. How an individual learns to be anything, especially a painter, is an unexplainable phenomenon, and for Kenfe Michael to become a sculptor/ painter is as great an enigma as any. But there are reasons that might shed light on his beginnings. In the late70s and early 80s, in his boring pre-artistic life as an exile and refugee in Paris, young Kenfe Michael had absolutely no idea why he was doing what he was doing--nothing. He knew he had the choice of either spending his time doing the things his peers were doing, which pretty soon got boring as far as he was concerned, or do some kind of work--something, anything, while he was living alone in his small apartment in the12th arondissement in Paris. One day, as he moved the sofa in his small room--he reorganized his room every weekend--his innate drive to create prompted him to decorate and paint the room divider between his bed and the kitchen. The thrill of decorating the folding screen led him to a decision: He was going to be an artist [1]. A few days later he decided to try his hand at commercial clay, and continued to create a lot of 3D statuettes until a Spanish marionette artist advised him to use a papier-mâché technique. In less than a year his tiny room was filled with painted papier-mâché sculptures. Where the folding screen painting is now, I do not know. He first showed it to me in 1983, proud as he was to show it to all who visited him. Myself, being totally overwhelmed by the number of galleries, museums, artists, and art dealers in Paris, paid no attention to his work. Instead, I remember asking Kenfe Michael if he was willing to show me the art museums, galleries and exhibitions in Paris that he knew and had visited. Although I learned later that he had visited virtually all the galleries and museums in and around Paris and southern France in the early 70s, he did not show any interest in responding to my inquiries. Probably feeling uneasy, and noticing my apathy toward the screen painting as well as my bewilderment at his papier-mâché sculptures, he changed the subject quickly. He asked me about Ethiopian artists back home. He talked about Christian Ethiopian paintings and mentioned several artists' names. He knew a lot more about contemporary Ethiopian artists than I had thought and he was excited when he recalled the art scene in Addis in the late 60s just before he left at the age of 19. The Surrealists, he called them--yes, the Modernists, [2]--I said and I went on reciting names: Skunder Boghossian, Daniel Touwafe, Alemayhu Bezunhe, Abdulrahman Mohamed Sherif, Zerihun Yetmgeta, Tewodros Tsege Markos, and the art critics: Kifle Besat, Sebhate Gebre Egziabhare, and Solomon Deressa. As if we were on the same wavelength, and I think we were, he kept nodding his head. Every time I rattled off lists of names, he added names of writers and actors, milestones from the recent glory of Ethiopian contemporary art. As he did so, I couldn't help noticing his typical supple Ethiopian face radiating with melancholy, the sad expression in his eyes hinting at suffering and weeping and yearning. At this point I knew I was dealing with someone whose artistic and cultural knowledge and sensitivity far exceeded the ordinary. Even though I did not pay enough attention to the folding screen painting, which now comes to me as a vision, I couldn't help but be impressed by his unusual personality. It was no accident that the city of Paris--a city which in her glorious days as the center of western art had recognized the genius of Lam, Picasso, and Chagal, to name only a few expatriate artists--discovered now again this genius, Kenfe Michael. He is among the few privileged artists who enjoy a studio at 3 Allee Marc Chagall in the center of Paris, furnished to him by the city. During my frequent visits in the 80s and more recently in our rare correspondence, I have not once heard him mention anyone else in connection with his art. He works under no obligation whatsoever. Despite the hardship of the expatriate life he experienced like thousands of us, his obsessive urge to pursue his vision for years is a rare quality, lacking in many of us. He is an independent, free-spirited person who lives by his art and is totally involved in his creativity. He is likely to remain so despite the constant harassment by dealers and speculators in the art world. The most arresting quality of Kenfe Michael's sculptures is that of the medium and the technique. Papier-mache has been used in a wide variety of applications, from elaborately decorated furnishings, or the simplest playful figurines and masks, to functional objects such as prefabricated papier-mâché houses and nose cones for fighter planes, until it was replaced by mass-production techniques of plaster and plastic. Kenfe Michael appropriately exploits papier-mâché, which has not been used, strictly speaking, as an artistic medium either by Ethiopians or by other artists, to the maximum. Newspaper, which since the turn of the century has been the basic material for development of papier-mâché, although the papier-mâché technique is as old as papermaking, is still the preferred material for Kenfe Michael's works. And Paris supplies the material in abundance. He starts by synthesizing a skeleton of sorts with chicken wire on a piece of wood or iron bar as armature. It is as though he is putting out the forms from memory. Apparently manipulating the papier-mâché over the chicken wire from the inside, he builds a form from scratch in a manner at once organic yet rudely hand-built. The result is painted in a brightly graded display of colors, defining wide open staring eyes and screaming faces. The first pleasure of looking at Bethe's papier-mâché sculpture paintings is that afforded by their bright colors, loosely painted in the three primary colors on a 3D surface. The virtuoso brilliance of tropical colors combined with technical dexterity and the aesthetic philosophy of the avant-garde painters and sculptors of the 20th century is clear and vivid. His works, which appear elusive to any kind of art theories or philosophies, is only on the surface. Deep down they tap and nourish a century of artistic achievement and share rural and sophisticated urban culture. Tapping 20th century avant-garde, his works are personal, intuitive, myth-making, with a universal applicability although they are primarily the result of an inner confrontation between the mythic symbols of the African ethos and Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions of his country. The viewer cannot help but relate his papier-mâché sculptures to the folkloristic style of Konso, Hadya, Wolamo, Gimira, Kambata, Aderie, Ifat, Axum, and Lasta. On the catalogue printed on the occasion of his Chartres exhibition, Bethe had a long conversation with Maithe Valles-Bled, conservator of Musee de Chartres, [3] and pointed out categorically that despite the number of years he has sojourned in France (25 years now), Ethiopia is the root of his papier-mâché sculptures. He also emphasized that he did not adhere to or follow one particular culture, African or Western, but rather a universal one, since he has lived in Latin America, Africa and Europe and also shares in the eastern sprit and culture of the Zen [4]. His stylistic individuality, an approach that has placed him in the front ranks by the end of the millennium is well described by The Times Art Critic John Russell Taylor [5]. No artists of his generation have achieved Kenfe Michael's particular international recognition in so short a time and none have brought to bear upon their work such uniformity of personal vision.Kenfe Michael created a vocabulary that transformed known and unknown images into a personal language in which the form and context combined to create a world of fantasy strongly affected by the more joyous overtones but also by the sorrow of his Ethiopian heritage. His popular manner of artistic execution reveals and conceals with its bright colors, and distance the viewer from the painful content while at the same time charming ingeniously. Kenfe Michael is aware of the centuries-old achievements of plastic arts in his country. He is also aware of the immense riches of African plastic forms of expression. Even more, he knows the world of contemporary art trends. He came out of all these to be a different kind of artist. His folk culture is blended with universal appeal and elements. His work, by its very character, by reason of the way it condenses nature, is a self-contained art like those of the African sculptor and of Ethiopian Christian paintings, brilliantly synthesized with visions of contemporary art. Its multisided representation, its radical distortion and its puzzling and intriguing imageries are barely legible at first glance. Like the Artist Outsider work's it turns into fantasy. In the manner of the African masks and sculptures, seemingly naive and simplistic, his papier-mâché sculptures are of a much deeper sense and sophistication. Outwardly joyous and cheerful, each character expresses and depicts untold suffering and unimaginable misery. Other than their composure and the yearning, no allusion whatsoever is made as to the time and the place. It is up to the spectator to figure out where and when. A perfect example of all these is seen in two of his large-sized works, entitled, "Transport de vestiges" and "Tour de planete," in which politics, power, corruption, famine and eventually exodus mingle in one, summarizing the agony of a people. 1] Personal discussion with Kenfe Michael in Paris in 1983-84. 2] Categorizing these artists by movements they do not adhere to is a disservice to their effort and to the outcome of Ethiopian art. In the absence of a group name or movement I have always used the generic name. 3] MICKAEL BETHE-SELASSIE SCULPTURES Musee des Beaux-Arts, CHARTRES l'Imprimerie Durand, 1995. 4] Roman Guetachew; his wife is a Yoga instructor in Paris. 5] Taylor, John Russell .MICKAEL BETH -SELASSIE. London: United Printers, 1993. By: Esseye G Medhin, 1995 |
