Glory Kanga introduces himself in the video below as an artiste classicien écologiste, a classical painter who works on nothing but the environment. His reasoning is short. There is a similitude de vie between man and nature, a likeness of life. Man cannot live without the environment, and everything he discovers and invents he owes to it. Watch the video first; the painting follows the argument almost point by point.
IRecours à la Tradition (“Return to Tradition”), acrylic on canvas, 150 by 130 centimeters, shows a man bent double over a green plastic basin set on a carved wooden stool. A heavy green cloth patched in orange covers his head and back, sealing him in with the steam. The posture is an inhalation: face held over hot water, vapor trapped under the cloth. The man himself has no flesh. Kanga builds the body from an open weave of wooden strands, his tranches d’arbre, slices of tree, and the night shows through the gaps. Behind him the ground is gray, the branches are bare, a pale moon hangs in the corner, and a dark bird waits in the shadow of the tree.
The floor around him is crowded with witnesses. A rooster in full color stands in the left foreground and a hummingbird hangs in the air behind him. At the man’s feet sits a pig in blue plastic. Beside the stool, an orange balloon dog. At the far right, small and dark, a carved figure sits on a carved chair and watches the scene from its edge. Kanga does not mention these objects in the video. The grouping reads anyway: living animals, plastic things, and one ancestor in wood.
The only manufactured thing on the man’s body is a wristwatch, painted over the weave of his forearm. In the video Kanga keeps returning to technology as the major challenge of the age. It offers evolution, he says, and gives man time to reflect. The reflection has a direction: man is supposed to protect nature and hand the coming generations their chance, because everything that touches nature also touches him.
The title comes out of the pandemic. During COVID, Kanga says, the world filled up with questions about treatment while nature already held the solution. That is what the man on the canvas has resorted to. Whatever troubles man, Kanga says at the end of the video, nature has the exact answer. The painting takes him literally. It puts the answer in a plastic basin on a carved stool and bends a man made of trees over it.
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