Eugene Palmer – Didn't it Rain

Eugene Palmer
Didn't it Rain: New Paintings

James Hockey & Foyer Galleries
University for the Creative Arts, Farnham
27th January – 24th March 2018

James Hockey and Foyer Galleries at University for the Creative Arts (UCA), Farnham are pleased to present Eugene Palmer’s first major solo exhibition in over a decade. Didn’t it Rain features three distinct but interconnected series of figurative works based on imagery garnered from personal and public spectra and reconstituted as a series of enthralling visual allegories, central to which is the Black female subject.
 
The focus of the exhibition is five larger-than-life-size double-portraits of Black women modelling elegant and even outlandish outfits. Scaled up and set against flat background colours, each portrait has a doppelgänger. Palmer’s use of repetition contains both explicit and latent meaning, signifying what he describes as the “labour of painting” but also a questioning of the authentic subject. The source of these portraits are American websites featuring Black women modelling various forms of church attire. Amongst the smiles and elegance, the sense of optimism and assuredness, there is also a certain disquiet permeating the work. Writer Carol Dixon notes “Whatever these women might be experiencing is shielded behind the façade of their personae.”
 
This new body of work explores the enduring relationship between Black people, the church and the idea of the extended family. Here, Palmer locates himself as part of a wider tradition, including the seminal writings of influential American thinkers such as W.E.B Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson, the foundational role of churches in the 1950s civil rights movement, the writing of James Baldwin and the art of Elizabeth Catlett and Keith Piper.
 
Baby Shower is a series of twelve sketches on paper, which, as the title suggests, are derived from a real-life gathering. Exuding an overwhelming sense of compassion and affirmation, the vitality of life and the extended family are evocatively captured. In Between Black and White, re-presents a close-up photograph of a woman as twelve near identical painted portraits. Here, replication functions as a form of visual alliteration; the paintings are similar, but rendered in a sequence of tonal variations. Pigmentation and composition are infused with ambiguity. The formal concerns of painting intersect those concerning the anthropological gaze and systems of racial classification.

Like the multivalent nature of all Palmer’s work, Didn’t it Rain denotes a multiplicity of cultural meanings. From a peculiarly British obsession with weather, ‘didn’t it rain’ is an old-time expression Palmer recalls from his early life in Jamaica. However, the Negro spiritual popularised in American gospel music by Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Mahalia Jackson arguably provides the adage’s most compelling manifestation, chiming with Palmer’s recollection of a religious upbringing, and a declaration of survival and perseverance in the Black diaspora.
 
Interlaced with an array of formal and conceptual concerns, Palmer’s primarily figurative painting is distinguished by its restless quest to probe and visualise the legacies and contemporary realities of Black diasporic identity.
 

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