Subtlety - The Weganda Review

R Cannon Griffin has been making art professionally since the beginning of the last decade, one of a small group of Ugandan artists whose work has probed, with clarity and precision, the boundaries of what is possible in artistic expression. The art gallery at Makerere University put on the first major exhibition of his drawings and sketches in 2013, in what was the continuation of a wonderful collaboration with Dutch artist Andrea Stultiens. He is the founder with Stultiens of History in Progress Uganda, an initiative to collect and publish photos that say something about Uganda’s past.

Canon Griffin, as he is known to his peers, has accumulated an expansive body of digital collage works of the kind that was exhibited last year at Goethe Zentrum Kampala. Images of some of his best digital work are included in this portfolio, which, most importantly, features multi-media paintings that have rarely been seen in public. These works in their totality are vintage Canon Griffin: playful, confounding, sometimes minimalist in composition, and almost always uncompromising in their dealings with truths.

Canon Griffin is an artist of many devices, and in conversation he quotes everyone from Nietzsche to Marx. He can speak quickly, his voice rising to a commanding pitch as he makes his point. Because of this, it is possible to misunderstand Canon Griffin, or dismiss him as an eccentric, or miss something important he has said, or even forget that he is an informally trained artist who interrupted his formal education to focus on making art. At all times, in his work as in his conversation, he is going for a lucidity such as we rarely see among our artists.

Canon Griffin spoke of his serendipitous beginnings when, taking a walk one day, he met Stultiens and they connected. Before that, following his high school education, he had been a studio photographer and a cameraman with TV stations. Speaking to TWR recently, he recalled the polemic content of his work in the 2013 show and the “harsh criticism” he received from critics who he insists misinterpreted the metaphors in his work. This is for him a recurring issue and a source of annoyance, but he is glad that institutions of higher education and high-IQ people gravitate to his work. “Our cultural conversations, the ones in the public realm, they tend to ride on spectacle. Once you have anything explicit in your work, everyone focuses on that and the rest is not seen,” he said. “So it’s a thing also to work on in general, so that people do not get distracted by the thing which stands out most.”

Canon Griffin told TWR that in his practice he is “more interested in the way things we know as humans affect the way we relate. So information is key, alongside emotional gesticulation.” To put it differently, he is usually grappling with the contradictions of existence and how the available truth can help us see things better. Often the details in his imagery are subtle, and it is this subtlety of perspective that gives his work gravitas.

Canon Griffin considers his digital work “more satisfying because I reach multiple audiences whereas, with the paintings, I get a bit constrained by the materiality.” Also, to back up this thought, he points out that there are a lot of paintings being made in Uganda today that it becomes exhausting to rummage through what is available. And, in addition to selling more, the digital work, much of which is surrealistic, achieves the precision he wants in his pictures. TWR finds his multi-media paintings unforgettable, and some are among the most exciting work to have been made by a Ugandan artist in recent times. “Big Boss,” for example, an acrylic on canvas he made in 2017, is magnificent for its scope, its imagery, and its palette. The man’s figure dominates the canvas largely because it has not been properly described, or rather because it has been described in airy, dreamy terms. By his freedom, by his sharp sense of intrigue, Canon Griffin has created a masterpiece in a singular expressionist style. Only he could have made that. “That painting is the soul of a man manifest,” he said. “It shows that we are usually carrying our childhood within us, but we are expected to be bulwarks of solidity.”

Canon Griffin, who was born in 1991, is the recipient of multiple honors. He was in residence at 32° East in 2018, the same year Afriart Gallery put on his Posers show, an outrageous but bright experiment with street mannequins. Notably, his digital collage work was featured in the Stellenbosch Triennale of 2020 and his work is in collections at home and abroad. “I look forward to making art that is necessary, which is what I am doing,” he said. We are excited for what this influential artist will create next. ▪