Diverse artists make fine group show in 'Cultural Affirmations'

Splashing with “embraceable colors,” Gerard Pefung from Cameroon mixes street-graffiti messages.

Local art lovers have a passport waiting to be stamped at Joysmith Gallery, which has quietly made a name for itself as a Memphis art space with true global reach.

The title of this month’s show, “Cultural Affirmations,” could in fact serve to describe most days of the week at the Downtown gallery, known for its vibrant array of African and African-American art and artful objects.

With ‘‘Mission Accomplished #1,’’ Hungarian Laszlo Horvath nests his view of war with a 17th century nod.

Splashing with “embraceable colors,” Gerard Pefung from Cameroon mixes street-graffiti messages.

‘‘Two Heads,’’ by Cuba’s Guillermo Portieles, speaks to sacrifice.

“I have no reason to take that off the wall,” says director Robert Bain of the exhibit name (Bain co-owns the gallery with his wife, artist Brenda Joysmith). “That’s what we do show after show — expose the work, culture and creative life of people of color around the world.”

The show runs through Sept. 24 and features Cameroon painter Gerard Pefung, Cuban painter Guillermo Portieles and Hungarian photographer/painter Laszlo Horvath. A seemingly disparate trio, these artists actually make for a fine group show, bound as they are by a balance of contemporary techniques and concerns with an affinity for historical precedent and heritage.

Originally from Cameroon’s capital Yaoundé, Pefung moved to the United States in 2001 to join his family and now lives in Omaha, Neb. His energized canvases, bright splashes of acrylic that mix street and graffiti-imbued art with traditional subject matter and symbols, use what he calls “embraceable colors” to engage the viewer, as in the chromatic dance of color that distinguishes two images of an elephant, one untitled and the other called “Paraplaine (Umbrella).”

Such work also reconnects the young artist, 23, with the culture of his west-central African home. “In Africa, living is an art form that should be celebrated,” he says. “That is mainly what my work portrays.” Imagine his surprise when he found one such reconnection at Joysmith, where a bronze king’s chair sits from the same village and ethnic group, the Bamileke, as his parents. “It just took me back,” he says, “to the early days and how we used to visit the king’s palace where they had chairs like that.”

Two works by Horvath are likewise steeped in tradition, albeit with a strong social and moral impulse. Based in Tampa, Fla., the artist, 59, grew up behind the Iron Curtain in the Hungarian town of Szombathely near the Austrian border and came to the States as a political refugee in the 1980s.

“I was kind of a rebellious guy,” he recalls. “I was talking against the machine and had a bad reputation.” Horvath escaped to Austria via Yugoslavia — “at the border they didn’t check anything” — and stayed for a time at a refugee camp.

Those experiences come out in his multi-media work, which involves first creating a sculpture, photographing it, and then rendering it as a painting. In one such piece, titled “Mission Accomplished #1,” a set of skulls rest like eggs in a nest, a nod to the death-and-decay subject matter of 17th century Dutch vanitas paintings. Yet the message, an indictment of war where death, not life, is waiting to be born, brings the work fully into the present day.

“The skull is actually made of plastic,” says Horvath, who began sculpting from bread and paper as a child. “I cut away the skull to make it much more real. I’m not pessimistic. I’m simply sensitive — about violation, greed — and I want to make people more concerned.”

The show’s final half-dozen pieces belong to Portieles, who paints nostalgic scenes of his country one minute — as in the vintage cars that populate the streets of Havana — and haunting surrealist works the next. “Two Heads,” for example, is a macabre, anthropomorphic vision of a tree with two heads sprouting from its branches, a Boschian-worthy nightmare limned in blood-red hues that suggest sacrifice, rebirth, and the dual nature of the material and spirit worlds. It also plays well against the gallery’s santería-evoking “Sacred Possession” series of serigraphs by fellow Cuban artist Santiago Rodriguez Olazabal.

“Cultural Affirmations”

On display through Sept. 24 at Joysmith Gallery, 46 Huling. Call 543-0505 or go to joysmith.com.

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