Milan, 31 December 2017
My wife and I went for a walk the other day in Milan’s so-called Fashion Quadrilateral, the zone in the city centre bounded by four roads – Via Montenapoleone, Via della Spiga, Via Manzoni and Corso Venezia. Here, you will find the boutiques (shops seems too vulgar a word) of the greatest Italian fashion brands as well as of quite a number of the best-known foreign brands. I won’t name names, I don’t feel like giving even an iota of publicity to these temples of conspicuous consumption.
I should clarify that I dislike visiting shops, and the higher the price tags on the merchandise the more I dislike them. Visits to places like Milan’s Fashion Quadrilateral therefore turn me into a rabid Socialist. In moments like these, my wife just ignores me and enjoys the window-gazing.
As I stumped grumpily along streets whose windows were stuffed with items the sale of any one of which could cover a Bangladeshi garment worker’s salary for several decades, I spied something out of the ordinary in a window. Now this was something intriguing indeed!
Seeing another one inside the boutique in question, I metaphorically held my nose and entered. It was somewhat smaller but just as striking.
A sign stenciled on the boutique’s window helpfully informed me that the works were by a certain Abdoulaye Konaté. I had never heard of this artist, but a quick search on the Internet revealed the bare bones of his life: he is a Malian artist, one year older than ourselves, and resides in Mali’s capital city, Bamako.
And what lovely pieces he creates! He works primarily with textiles, with one thread of his work – if I may put it that way – veering towards abstract compositions made with small rectangular stripes of highly coloured cotton textiles, much like his works in the boutique. I give here a little gallery of these works, drawn from the Internet.
This final one has recently been purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York:
The other main thread of his work veers more towards the figurative, as these examples show:
Thoroughly excited by these discoveries, after Christmas I headed to the gallery in town which was lending the pieces to the boutique. Alas! The gallery only held the pieces loaned to the fashion boutique. Instead, it was holding a show dedicated to Gianfranco Zappettini, an Italian artist from the so-called Analytical school of the 1970s. Paintings like these surrounded us as the young, enthusiastic fellow on duty told us more about Konaté and eventually about Zappettini.
Analytic painting, and I quote, “wished to conduct an analysis of the material components of paintings (the canvas, the frame, the material of the paint, the colour, signs) and the material relationship that takes place between the work as physical object and its author. Painting therefore became the subject of investigation of itself and lost the references which linked it to reality (in figurative painting), to expressiveness (in abstract painting) and to the underlying significance (in conceptual art)”. Well, that pretty much sums up the complete dead-end that modern Western art has finished up in. A feeling that was underscored for me by a visit to a new art venue in Milan, the Pirelli Bicocca, once – as its name implies – a factory of the Pirelli Group, now a large ex-industrial space given over to art. The space is wonderful. But this is what we saw there – piles of old clothes passed off as art.
Konaté takes textiles and turns them into lovely pieces of art. We in the west can only make untidy piles out of these textiles and call it art. It seems to me that contemporary art is like an old tree, rotted away at its heart but still living around its edges which are supporting an exuberant foliage.
Thank God for Malian artists like Abdoulaye Konaté, or Inuit artists like Kananginak Pootoogook, or Malagasy artists like Joel Andrianomearisoa, or a dozen other artists from the so-called periphery of the world, who are keeping art alive!
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Shopping in Via Montenapoleone: http://www.wheremilan.com/discover-milan/sightseeing/montenapoleone-district/
Abdoulaye Konaté: http://www.artesmundi.org/artists/abdoulaye-konate
Abdoulaye Konaté-abstract-1: https://www.blainsouthern.com/artists/abdoulaye-konat%C3%A9
Abdoulaye Konaté-abstract-2: https://it.pinterest.com/sztukaafryki/abdoulaye-konat%C3%A9/?lp=true
Abdoulaye Konaté-abstract-3: https://www.wallpaper.com/art/abdoulaye-konat-exhibits-merges-music-and-colour-at-blainsouthern-gallery
Abdoulaye Konaté-abstract-4: https://www.widewalls.ch/abdoulaye-konate-at-blain-southern-berlin-solo-exhibition-useful-dreams-2015/
Abdoulaye Konaté-abstact-5: https://it.pinterest.com/pin/461689399276917735/
Abdoulaye Konaté-abstract-6: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/655979
Abdoulaye Konaté-figurative-1: http://biennaleartmagazine.com/1986/04/18/abdoulaye-konate-arken-21-april-18-september-2016-dk/
Abdoulaye Konaté-figurative-2: https://it.pinterest.com/sztukaafryki/abdoulaye-konat%C3%A9/?lp=true
Abdoulaye Konaté-figurative-3: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-16308012
Abdoulaye Konaté-figurative-4: https://www.artsy.net/artwork/abdoulaye-konate-fete-africaine-the-men-and-the-marionettes
Abdoulaye Konaté-figurative-5: https://scope-art.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/SMB14-NL-03-v5.html
Gianfranco Zappettini paintings: http://www.primomarellagallery.com/it/mostre/63/la-luce-prima/
Old hollowed-out tree: https://www.shutterstock.com/video/clip-6904222-stock-footage-old-hollowed-out-oak-tree-was-struck-by-lightning-about-years-ago-and-despite-having-a-lost-it.html
the heart thrills 