Margaret Harris: between avant-garde & primitivism

For over a decade, the most prominent feature in Margaret Harris´ work (Portsmouth, United Kingdom, 1955) perhaps has been the coexistence of artistic avant-garde & primitive aesthetics, somewhere between innovative elements & the simplicity of the earliest artistic expressions, between Western tradition & the pure & primordial spirit that envelopes the African continent. Undoubtedly, this solid and passionate link derives from her lengthy stay in the Republic of South Africa, where she lived from thirteen to seventeen years of age, and has continued to visit until the present time. In South Africa she learnt to relate things in a different way, as well as a new concept of time, rhythm and variations of what we usually understand as harmony and proportion among the parts of an object- but without discarding her European roots. The best proof of all this is the work in this exhibit, its main features l will briefly describe in the following paragraphs.

In the first place is her control of the abstract shape, the almost absolute independence in many of her compositions from the world of nature, in the sense that we cannot determine which are the models of the painter, even though there are remote associations with the vegetable kingdom, particularly trees and seeds, and at times with shields and other defensive weapons of certain tribes of Southern Africa. The latter is particularly evident in Ève´s Peach ll. Nevertheless, the most common shapes are geometric-rectangles, squares, triangles, half circles, without defining their contours with mathematical precision, provoking a symbiosis between the geometric shape and the materials employed, creating different thickness among the parts of a composition and carefully erasing the physical characteristics of the materials employed.

Indeed, the materials are another important feature in these latest works by Margaret Harris. She employs wood, and mainly cardboard, thick wavy cardboard with its rigidity and coarseness clearly exposed. However, the painter softens that coarse texture by uniformly applying pigment to the entire piece, usually an intensely blue pigment that evokes the colour of the sea, of this Mediterranean sea that is so close to us and near which Margaret Harris decided to make her home in 1978, choosing a tranquil spot of Malaga’s Axarquía. At times, such as in ´Worlds Apart´, the composition is symmetrically divided into two zones, one painted grey and the other one blue, separated by a white band with a wavy line. The same type of line, but this time in golden tones, is found in `Split Pears, even though now the horizontal arrangement dividing the markedly rectangular shape in bands is highly decorative. When just the uniform blue and gold are combined in a composition, it becomes highly poetic, thanks to the peculiar chromatic contrast. At times, as in `Frontiers and other pieces, the white band that dissects the composition contains one line in Arabic text that seems to have no beginning and no end, and whose content is usually related to contemporary political and social issues, such as the difficult situation of women in the Islamic world, but stated in a subtle, almost imperceptible fashion. In the above –mentioned ȁve’s Peach l ‘ and ‘Eve’s Peach ll, the naked branches of the trees spread out on a starry sky, in the first case, and on what could be a wheat field, in the second.

Simple and austere, one could apply to Margaret Harris’ works the words of Rabelais, perhaps citing the words of Plinus the Old: <As you know, Africa is always contributing something new. > Works united to the earth, the virginity of pigments and the handcrafted quality of the object, but also to the everlasting conquests of the European avant-garde, to the synthesis of the shape, to the pre-eminence of the visual over the narrative.

(ENRIQUE CASTAÑOS ALÉS)

Traducing de Laura Eastment