Watercolours are poised at the point between painting and drawing, between acting and thinking. John Ruskin’s watercolours of Venetian Gothic architecture are preemptive acts of romantic nostalgia, the medium’s own insubstantiality – fading in bright light, evaporating in strong heat, dissolving in a splash of water – somehow reflecting that of his subject. The portability and relative ease of watercolour painting makes it the flâneur-historian’s medium of choice. Like Ruskin’s, PAPA’s watercolours are sometimes framed with scribbly notes and leaps of thought and thus have the quality, together, of a pre-war museum catalogue, the idiosyncratic inventory of the shuttered academic.

Taking as his subject the British Museum’s Benin bronzes, PAPA paints the objects as objects, faithfully recording a fraying of thin bronze, a warped corner. Each of his images is lit in the raking light of the conservator’s studio. It’s scientific, purposeful. The Benin bronzes are displayed in the BM’s African galleries on vertical rods, but not so in PAPA’s renderings: each is observed in isolation, like a specimen in a lab. Yet, as with Ruskin, this is no mere transcription of reality, and it’s no coincidence that they happen to be watercolours, either. The Benin bronzes are remnants of the West African kingdom (part of present-day Nigeria) that was roundly pillaged by British soldiers in 1897. The bronzes, originally designed to be hung on pillars in the atria of Benin’s opulent royal palaces, were looted and sold to the British Museum in 1899. Their complex symbolism, stippled patterning and plunging relief made them hard to locate within Eurocentric views of history that placed classicism as the summit of aesthetic endeavor; in no way do they conform to ‘primitivist’ notions of African art. So, historically, they’re awkward. Ruskin, too, saw an endearing awkwardness in Gothic buildings: something human, something bodily, as respite from all that boxy classicism. Questions, not answers.

PAPA’s use of watercolour posits the bronzes as components in an ethnographic inventory – they’re largely lacking in background, and fill the space of the paper in an expository way, like illustrations in a history text book – yet it also gives the images a kind of distance and frailty that holds the subject at arm’s length, as though seen through frosted glass. Depicted at a meticulous remove, the images – like ‘First Contact’ (2005), a rendering of a Benin image of a Portugese trader on which much of the royal wealth of Benin was built – are filled with a kind of questioning, opening up the strangeness of the images rather than securing them to a historical continuum. It’s as though the act of painting loosens up the image rather than nailing it down. The more you see, the less you know.

Dr. Ben Street