A evaluate by Michael Prodger for The Occasions of London.
Largely courtesy of the nation’s Protestant heritage, the carnival custom in Britain is a muted affair. Elsewhere, nonetheless, in locations the place Catholic roots run nearer to the floor, the intuition for ritualised abandonment stays vibrant. Carnival, Mardi Gras, bacchanalia, kermesse and masked balls provide a world quickly with out guidelines and spring from the urge to slough off each day cares and oppressions — usually a ultimate splurge earlier than the privations of Lent.
Nowhere is that this apply extra alive than within the Caribbean, the place the islands, of their barely other ways, have fun with music, dancing, costume and feasting. In Paint Just like the Swallow Sings Calypso at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, three West Indian artists take a look at their very own expertise of carnival along with works chosen from the gallery’s personal assortment and the Fitzwilliam Museum.
John Lyons, Whip Snake, 2004; woodcut
Paul Sprint (born in Barbados in 1946), Errol Lloyd (born in Jamaica in 1943) and John Lyons (born in Trinidad in 1933) present their very own work alongside items by the likes of Graham Sutherland and David Bomberg, Albrecht Dürer and Francisco Goya. At occasions the correlations could be a stretch and it is a very wordy exhibition with prolonged wall texts explaining correlations and shared (whether or not actual or imagined) sensibilities.
Typically the hyperlinks are tangible: Goya’s Caprichos etchings are filled with witches and folkloric superstition and Lyons’s expressionist image of masked revellers Mama Look a Mas Passin (1990) accommodates the Jab Molassie Satan character whereas one other options the Obeah Lady — a Trinidadian witch. Elsewhere the relationships are relatively extra willed: animal and nature spirits might play a task in Caribbean carnival, however it’s exhausting to think about a much less public artist than David Jones (1895-1974) whose etching of a puma is co-opted right here. Nor does a Helen Frankenthaler panorama objectively have a lot to do with the custom both.
Avinash Chandra, Design, 1961; pen and ink and watercolour on paper
The work of the three painters comes extra clearly into focus when seen alongside a choice of European works displaying communal celebrations, from Dürer’s Torch Dance at Augsburg (c 1518) and Pieter Brueghel the Youthful’s A Village Competition (c 1564-68) — filled with puking, canoodling, brawling and entranced rustics — to Jacques Callot’s commedia dell’arte figures from the seventeenth century and Charles Conder’s early Twentieth-century fancy costume get together. Then Sprint’s revellers that emerge from a mass of hatched strains, Lyons’s brightly colored if sinister masqueraders and Lloyd’s kaleidoscopic Notting Hill Carnival dancers seamlessly take their place in a protracted historic line of carousers who maintain actual life at bay and grow to be somebody or one thing else, even when only for a day.
To Feb 19, kettlesyard.co.uk