Review of Rashid Jogee retrospective exhibition
AN exhibition of paintings and graphics by Rashid Jogee is currently showing at the Bulawayo National Art Gallery of Zimbabwe.
Curated by Doris Kamumpira, the exhibition commemorates the life of the late Bulawayo born artist – often referred to as “Son of the Soil”.
He studied under Marshall Baron who influenced his approach to art.
In the early 1990s, he attended numerous workshops such as the Pachipamwe and Tulipamwe series of workshop held under the Triangle Arts Foundation that included artists from the larger part of the SADC region.
Popular among his peers, Jogee’s art work was highly idiosyncratic, yet expressive of his socio-cultural and religious milieu.
A Muslim by faith, his work was tied to his religious beliefs and social encounters.
Annual Islamic religious commemorations such as Laylatul Meera, Laylatul Baraat, Eid-ul-Fiti, Eid-ul-Adgha, Youmi Arafah and Ramadan, were important and repeatedly celebrated in colour, line and euphoric forms by the devout artist, in acknowledgement of his religious convictions.
A nationalist at heart, Jogee’s unique voice and hand produced and showed the mind of an artist who, in the late 1970s, was conscripted as a war medic.
Already then, his art could move audiences outside his culture and the socio-political tides of his time.
Jogee is difficult to fit into any historical trend or category apart from his own history and that of the country he loved.
His was an unconventional and unique voice that sought universal peace.
His brand of lyrical abstraction branded him as an artist in the fullest sense of the word; he introduced a new idiom that represented total freedom.
Zimbabwean-Islamic artist Jogee was born in Bulawayo on February 11, 1951 and grew up in former Rhodesia at a time when the country was experiencing racial, religious and cultural intolerance.
He became one of the country’s most independent and original artists who worked in a variety of styles and tackled subjects that promoted social and cultural cohesion.
Jogee made his art a language that could express everything; spiritual, social, tangible and intangible, including the artist’s view on matters of the world and social human life.
I first made acquaintance with him in 1981.
“The idea, the paint and ink flow through my veins,” Jogee would often say to me.
One could not underrate his powers of intuition and invention.
For this writer the artist represented the highest achievements in the realm of human drama.
Mysteriously complex and yet defined by a unique signatory style, Jogee was always exploring line and colour in a unique musical and lyrical manner.
An analysis of his work reveals that every ink, mark or brush stroke was bold and unique, continually developing like a poem in media-res; a fluid spontaneous flow of ink – uninhibited, identic, automatic, intuitive and adroit.
A prolific painter once he settled down to work, Jogee was a master draftsman, achieving great effects in Indian ink, acrylic or oils by simple means.
His draftsmanship offered the viewer unique examples of spontaneity and the economy of line.
His work was at all times an involuntary and automatic outpouring of emotion and the spirit of the moment.
His ink and wash sketches of voluptuous femininity, though geometric in form, reveal his dexterity and immediacy of hand.
Experimenting with the bare essentials of media to create timeless artworks, Jogee’s abstract art show the mind of an artist who, though unwillingly conscripted as a war medic for the Rhodesian Forces, reflected his sense of social consciousness to fulfil a need that concerned everyone and a social need to record the historical times. His art could move audiences outside his time, space and culture
Beyond painting, Jogee was musically astute; a quality evident in his lyrical abstract painting – not unlike a colourful musical cycle in the opera of life.
With an unconventional unique voice, his brilliant orchestral colours were culled from the Zimbabwean environment.
Uniquely Afro-Islamic, his African-Arabic body of works contained Islamic calligraphy not paralysed by academic theories and difficult-to-fit into any obvious historical trend or category.
His colour schemes gave respite from the wild and energetic gestural lines, yet emotionally harmonised masterpieces.
His was an art with virtue on a spiritual plane; where art brings hope and the will to live.
His art found its present celebrated place in the repertory of African abstract artists and occupies a special space in the history of Zimbabwean art
Rashid Jogee Afro Abstract Expressionist art radiated to universal audiences on a level beyond common human experience.