Nationality doesn’t seem to count for much in art today; new trends in Dakar can be assimilated in Dalston by lunchtime. Having scoured the globe over the past 30-odd years, collector Charles Saatchi must be more aware of this than most of us. Which makes the second part of his two-continent contemporary art survey a bit of a head scratcher. The title conjures anachronistic images of explorers in pith helmets bringing back precious artefacts for our amazement. The reality is that most of these artists are well versed in the language of successful international contemporary art.
Some make the kind of work that has attained that status thanks, in no small part, to Saatchi himself. The first gallery, for example, conforms to a classic Saatchi art trope of ‘lots of small things repeated in a big space’. In this instance Jean-François Boclé from Martinique has filled the gallery with hundreds, or possibly thousands, of blue plastic bags, some apparently inflated, to create a kind of cool, corner shop formalism. It may make you think fleetingly about wastefulness, or whether you need to pick up milk on the way home, though possibly not the transatlantic slave trade as the handout prompts you to do.
Others, like Ivorian artist Aboudia, whose sloshy paintings of wide-eyed, bulbous-headed characters are exaggeratedly ‘tribal’, warn against looking for traits according to nationality or race. Even so, the show encourages you to read Costa Rican artist Federico Herrera’s blocky abstractions as ‘tropically coloured’.
Pangaea, in case you aren’t up on your geology, is the most recent of a series of supercontinents – a land mass that around 270 million years ago contained all today’s known continents. The entire world, in other words. Saatchi’s selection, then, is suitably random. In fact, the show works best when you stop trying to make sense of it and enjoy it for what it is – a mixed bag of recent-ish purchases. There are moments of beauty and humour. Painting is especially strong, such as ‘Horizonte En Cálma’ by Alida Cervantes. Born in San Diego, raised in the border town of Tijuana, Mexico and trained in Italy, Cervantes turns divisions of race, sex, class and culture into an endless expressionist pantomime, a kind of Punch and Judy show featuring vengeful dollies and severed cocks. That’s fun wherever you’re from.
Martin Coomer