Rainbow Warrior
An exhibition of work by Rafiee Abdul Ghani,
Galerie Chandan, Bukit Damansara 1-26 June 2009
When the Mother Earth is sick and the animals dying there will come a tribe of peoples from all cultures, who believe in deeds, not words, and they will restore the Mother Earth to her former beauty. This Tribe will be called, the Warriors of the rainbow. Ancient Hopi prophesy.
The above text is taken from an ancient North American Hopi Indian belief. Later, the essence and meaning of that text was incorporated into William Willoya and Vinson Brown’s book Warriors of the Rainbow (1962). It is from that book that the environmentalist group - Greenpeace, borrowed the concept to give name to their first fishing vessel - Rainbow Warrior, sunk by agents of the French government in 1985. It is now the title of Rafiee Abdul Ghani’s exhibition at Bukit Damansara.
There is much to connect the increasingly organic work of the artist Rafiee Abdul Ghani to those stalwart concepts held aloft by Greenpeace and other environmentalist groups. They include the re-greening of the planet, saving threatened flora and fauna, a profound love of nature and an intrinsic belief in the preservation of our environment.
Since Rafiee Abdul Ghani’s early works - Ingatan dari Gunung (Memory of Mountains -1985) and Green Park 4 (1993), an insightful care and concern for nature’s milieu has been self evident within the artist’s works.
A thread of quiet concern links Rafiee’s entire image making, from the seeming abstract (Ingatan dari Gunung – 1985), to the expressionistic (Purple Flowers – 1997) and through to the predominantly figurative, with expressionistic abstract overtones (Yellow Wind Coming - 2008).
It is a concern for nature, our planet, and, like a Rainbow Warrior of legend, Rafiee is intent upon giving a warning regarding man’s footprint on the planet, while also revealing the intense beauty of the world as seen through his eyes.
Over the last few years the artist has been seen searching for a method of developing figurative work, within the context of an expressionistic framework. Man, both as a concept and a reality, has been increasingly portrayed as an integral nexus for the artist’s depictions of nature, recollection and innocence.
Certainly innocence, rather than naiveté, has pervaded Rafiee’s works over the past two decades. With his nuanced painterly sophistication, the artist currently presents the perfect symbol for innocence and love – the purity of the child.
In the artist’s works, presented at Galerie Chandan, we encounter Ali’s Wonderland 1, an obvious play on Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Here we see a young boy (Ali/Rafiee) wading through a life beset with nature, imaginings, flowers, butterflies, planes and bombs. It is an age of communication, but the letters remain sealed, it is an age of beauty and of butterflies as he luxuriates on the beach of time and timelessness, stretching, wondering, and pondering. Sand pulls waters to him as he is weighed by the heaviness of being, kneels and rests his head on sand, the bright sun hot on his young shoulders.
Alternately the twin fascinations of melancholia and listlessness pose the boy, as he kneels, deep in innocent thought, beside reflections of eternal nature, or with grim determination stretches, climbing to pluck jasmine flowers, which, like his future, are just beyond his reach.
The growing awareness of his Jungian symbolic internal world is all that separates the boy from the nature which surrounds him. His moodiness, his insular thought-filled reality ultimately cuts the boy off from the lush, vibrant world around him.
Ever in thought he inhabits the hanging gardens, observes geese, glares at the sun or sits enveloped in the glow of a peach moon. At times, compelled by his inherent cheekiness, the boy rests one foot on a red plastic chair and waves out to sea, growing to become aware of his gesture and its double meaning.
Thoughtful adults sit surrounded by fireflies and butterflies, as if caught in reveries by Odilon Redon (Firefly Beach – 2008), or smile towards the viewer unaware of the solemn child melding into an array of butterflies and Hockneyesque imagery (The Piano Beach – 2009).
In Whales in the Sky (2009) to some extent we are back within the realm of the Ali’s Wonderland 1, only in the foreground leans a stylised young woman, wiping a tear from her eye, she leans as if leaving, or resting from some sorrow which threatened to overwhelm her, but at the moment of painting had not succumbed yet. In the mid-ground drifts painterly paraphernalia of butterflies, flowers, fish and a variety of objects which pull the viewers eye through to the child, standing, gazing to off canvas left (viewers left).
In the background blue whales swim in lighter blue skies, a brown aeroplane is sighted against a white backdrop. The sadness and anxiety of the painting reveals a last gasp, the moment before all is lost, before the youth of the boy is lost forever, and the penultimate moment before the ultimate extinction of the whales, forests and finally us.
Is the boy the Rainbow Warrior, who is finally preparing for battle as he gazes off canvas, is his stance that of the martial arts horse, a position of strength from which he will spring ready to save the day, and the planet. The soft despair of the woman is countered by the bold strength of the boy, hand clasping wrist. We shall never know, for the exhibition poses questions rather than provides answers, it is for us to search within our sensibilities and reconcile ourselves to what the artist Rafiee Abdul Ghani is saying through his work.
Somewhere, at the back of my mind, unbidden, two tunes danced through my consciousness as I viewed these images produced by Rafiee Abdul Ghani. There was, quite obviously you might think - Don’t Kill the Whale, by the aging British progressive rock band Yes, replete with Jon Anderson’s distinctive vocals, and the less obvious Seaside Woman by Paul McCartney’s band Wings. Why Seaside Woman, because, at times, while viewing Rafiee’s images, I could see the deft hand of the Argentine cartoonist and animator Oscar Grillo, and his flamboyantly coloured animations for both Seaside Woman (1980) and the Kia-Ora adverts (1981).
