Many modern masters made the artistic pilgrimage to Africa seeking rejuvenation, searching for a new way of "seeing". Picasso found it in the African masks and gave birth to cubism.
Others, especially in the so-called "New World" drank from its wellspring to produce what is now referred to as "magical realism." Without placing him on the same pedestal, Mosera, has let the Africa he has been carrying within him emerge in a different way on his canvas.
In his new exhibition titled "Linkage", Mosera returns to a familiar space, a well-known terrain to him, where he feels at home, and where his work acquires the dimension of a "seer" who knows his medium.
Seeing is an essential aspect of the plastic arts. However, what the inner eyes see may make the naked eyes seem blind. The true artist sees with his inner eyes, where the real and the surreal are sometimes wedded through "magic"; where "reality" is not what is real, but what you make real, and hence does not have to conform to existential facts.
In "Linkage", which opens Thursday, February 11, 2010 at the Tropisme Gallery in Grand Case, Mosera’s works are shown alongside a number of "ancient" African sculptures in the private collection of art connoisseur, J.C. Huet. The combination is an invitation to compare Mosera’s paintings with these sculptures from the Motherland.
It is a tantalizing proposition given the fact that we are being asked to compare apples and oranges. But the closer we look, the clearer we see what Mosera has been trying to make us see for a long while through his inner eyes: that as descendants of Africans in the New World, Africa has never left us.
The African mask represents a combination of spiritual, cultural, ceremonial and traditional values of a people who treasured communal life. How are these values reflected in Mosera’s paintings? The answer can be found on the walls of the Tropisme Gallery in Grand Case.
Mosera, who donated his painting, "Judas Kiss", sold recently for some Naf. 7,000.00 in an exhibition in Curacao that raised about Naf. 119,000 in aid of the victims of the Haitian earthquake, last showed his works here in December 2008. He, however, took part in an exhibition held in November 2009 to officially open the Inner Gallery in St. Lucia in which Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott was one of the featured artists.
The new exhibition, "Linkage" is open to the public from February 11 – February 21 from 10:00AM until 1:00PM and 5:00PM to 9:00PM daily. The official opening will start at 6:00PM Thursday, February 11. Admission is free.