Chips off the cold block

Ask any artist whose subject is the human face what the point is behind their work is and most will tell you, it is to reveal the person inside the skin. Aime Mpane seems to have taken that ambition to another level.

Two walls of wood-panel portraits that the Congolese artist has on view at the National Museum of African Art do just that.

The images of human faces are not just painted but scraped with a blade into the cheap plywood he works with — in some cases so energetically that nothing is left but a gaping hole where the face would be.

In such instances, you don't see the inner person at all, but the wall on which the picture is hung.

Of course, voids tells you something, too. Something about the pressures of poverty that bear down on Mpane's countrymen. (The installation's French title, Ici On Creve, can be roughly translated as Here We Are Worn Out.)

Created between 2006 and 2008, Mpane's work is part of a show called Artists in Dialogue: Antonio Ole and Aime Mpane.

It is the first in a series of two-artist exhibitions that the museum hopes will give like-minded contemporary artists the chance to converse with each other, rather than to soliloquise.

The centrepiece of the show is a pair of site-specific sculptures created just for the exhibit, one by Mpane, and one by Ole, of Angola. The question is: Do they have anything to say to each other?

Both pieces are, unsurprisingly, concerned with surface.
Along one wall, Ole has fashioned an evocation of the shantytown architecture of the slum-like musseques of his homeland.

Fashioned from bits of industrial junk, Allegory of Construction I is a vivid and poignant hodgepodge, a smiley face slapped on top of the unhappiness of an underlying social ill.

Running parallel to it is Mpane's work. Called Rail, Massina 3 after a commercial strip in Congo's capital of Kinshasa, it is another façade, an almost theatrical parody of the colourful advertisements and shop fronts found there.

Both works speak to a kind of paradox. Not just between the haves and the have-nots but between the beautiful and the abject.

It is a dialogue worth having but not the most stimulating conversation you will find here.

At the opposite end of the gallery from Mpane's painted portraits, you will find photographic portraits by Ole.

Shot between 1973 and 1979, as the artist travelled through Angola documenting his country's transition from colonial rule to independence, the pictures are simple and starkly frontal.

His subjects stare out at us — one through broken eyeglasses — with a mixture of “intensity, dignity and pathos''.

Unlike Mpane's portrait subjects, whose faces have been literally incised, the scars on Ole's subjects are invisible. But they are no less painful to look at.

Painting with an added dimension

Trained as a painter at Belgium's Visual Arts School of the Cambre, Aime Mpane nevertheless thinks sculpturally.

One of his pieces features a life-size male figure, constructed out of 4,652 wooden matchsticks and glue.
Even his paintings have a 3-D quality.

Starting with a piece of plywood, the artist doesn't build up the surface as some do. Rather, he tears away at it as he paints, using an adze, or traditional L-shaped axe (where the “foot'' of the L is a short, curved blade).

It is not a subtle tool. It rips away at the thin material, gouging out large wood chips, some of which can be seen on the floor next to ‘Rail, Massina 3'.

One other thing. Mpane is said to prefer working after dark, by fire or candlelight, without even bothering to check his progress in the light of day until he is done.

It is for that reason the artist seems to have felt, rather than seen, his way through the faces in ‘Ici On Creve'.