Kwesi Abbensetts pushing the artistic envelope

On a piece of string that ran across a small lawn space at 3 Widcombe Crescent in Liguanea, St Andrew, were pinned several pieces of “butcher paper” of various sizes.

It was a Saturday afternoon, and the scene looked like a typical Caribbean backyard with clothes pegged to a line. On the grass were two small pieces of paper that looked like clothes blown from the line, only that they were placed there purposefully.

The unframed, crumpled pieces were works of art, created by contemporary Guyana-born artist Kwesi Abbensetts, being showcased in his first solo art exhibition in Kingston called ‘Surfaces, the Tropic Series’. They were all created here in Jamaica in Abbensetts’ personal residence.

And the pieces on the ground were actually going through a sort of metamorphosis, being transformed by the elements to become works of art themselves. “All the work is done right here on the grass – none of it was done indoors – and were wet by the rain, dried by the sun, weathered,” he told The Gleaner.

PUSHING WATER

These abstract pieces are in response to the colour, space, and terrain of Jamaica. The textured surface of each piece looks like residue and deposits of silt, mud and gravel found on riverbeds and seabeds. The effect is achieved by creating a colour field through a method called ‘pushing water’ in which he uses the natural movement of water bonded in paint, dye and materials that give each crumpled piece of paper “context and cultural reference, and texture”.

“Surfaces explores the culture and topography of the island through the use of butcher paper, acrylic, nature, and time. Each piece was created entirely open to the elements and shaped by the sun, wind, and rain over the course of two months,” Abbensetts explained, “This process produces a topographical composition in the painting the way water carves mountains and hills. The painting’s surface becomes akin to looking at earth from above or looking down at the island terrain from a plane.”

It is pure abstract expressionism, as there is no specific theme, message, or narrative that each piece is trying to convey; the interpretation is left entirely up to the viewer. His is a process of creation led by “intuition, spirit, and unconscious calling,” he said.

Upon starting a piece, he explained, “I don’t know what I am doing to a certain extent, but I know what I want to achieve; something of beauty, something that has balance, that has composition, work that has texture, work that has gradation of colours, many layers ... . I don’t do references, I’m just going strictly by my feelings, by my intuition.”

Abbensetts also uses “ancestral memory, cultural connections and the influence of native environment to create a call and response”. Childhood memories of walking barefooted in the dust in his ‘Sixty-Four Village’ in the Guyanese countryside are embedded in some of the pieces influenced by the ground, and the soil, though he has left Guyana decades ago. Incidentally, that was where his foray into art began. His articulation of it, however, started when he moved to the United States. In the early days he was a painter with a brush, but all of that has now changed.

His style and technique are bordering on the unique, and he said the only other person that does anything similar is another notable Guyanese artist, whose work is not as layered and detailed as his. It is for him to “go ahead and push that further” he said about that artist’s work, and he is using his ‘pushing water’ method to do just that.

The influence of the Jamaican culture and story on his work is betrayed by his superimposition of a little piece of a photograph of a Jamaican scene on his paintings and the Jamaican $20 coin showing the likeness of National Hero Marcus Garvey. “I’m coming from a place of blackness ... I just stuck to Garvey from a black liberation point of view,” he explained.

Now based in Newark, New Jersey, Abbensetts is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist who focuses on abstract painting, photography and film. He was the recipient of the Darryl Foundation Grant (2020) and New York Film Academy Photography Fellowship Award (2016).

His work has been shown at Third Horizon’s Film Festival (2017), Timehri Film Festival (2020), and various solo and group exhibitions across the United States, such as Mocada Museum in Brooklyn, Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute in Harlem, Spanierman Miami, and Cove Street Arts in Maine, among others.