The Ghanaian artist Tafa Fiadzigbe – known to the art world simply as Tafa – has come a long way. “I grew up in the slums of Ghana, and the slums in the third world are very different from slums here in America,” he said to the Guardian. “I knew people who ate from garbage dumps. When I was growing up, if someone told me I was going to be in the company of people like Bill Clinton and have them support my art, I’d have thought they were crazy.”
Now showing at Chelsea’s Pictor Gallery in New York until 25 February, Tafa’s art is at once visceral, transcendent and abstract. The pieces at his show include a frenzied protest march against police violence, an ethereal image of a goddess making her ascent and a homage to Sarah Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman who was exoticized by 19th-century Europeans for her bodily proportions.
Pursuing his vocation, Tafa studied art as a college student in Ghana before setting his sights on New York City. Upon arriving in 1993, he quickly realized he had some major misconceptions about his adopted home. “Originally I thought there were just a few hundred artists in New York. Eventually I realized there were thousands and thousands from all over the world.”
Looking back, Tafa now believes that his lack of knowledge was actually an asset. “Maybe 95% of artists in NYC don’t make a living from their art. I didn’t know how hard it was to make your living from art. If I knew what I knew 10 years later, I probably wouldn’t have done it. I was lucky.”
A lauded innovator with the palette knife, Tafa turns countless lumps of color into paintings that cause intense feelings of motion and exuberance. Although his subjects vary widely, frequent themes are the Black struggle for equal rights, the majesty of contemporary sports and the rhythms and movement of music. Whatever he is composing, for Tafa, dynamism is key.
“When I paint, I like movement and for the paint to be very dynamic. I use layer and layers, I scratch the paint, all to create the balance of movement and a rippling effect. I don’t want it to be static, I want you to feel the movement and power and energy. I want you to hear the sound and voices of the people, the anger and frustration and all that.”
A breakthrough moment happened for Tafa early on in this time in New York when David Dinkins, who was then in office as the city’s first Black mayor, came to one of Tafa’s shows and bought a piece. Besides being a prominent politician, Dinkins was also a known art collector and a fierce advocate for culture, and so was in a position to get Tafa noticed. “Because of Dinkins, a lot of people started coming to me and saying ‘I saw your art.’”
Pictor Gallery’s director Denise Adler happened to meet Tafa by chance when each of their daughters attended the same high school together. She quickly knew that Tafa was an artist she wanted to pay attention to. “When I met him, I realized he was the real deal. I noticed that he was very quiet and subdued, but his work is so colorful and loud. I love his color choices, his use of paint. I’m fascinated with artists who do texture like he does. It has almost a mixed media quality to it.”
Adler added that she was compelled by Tafa’s ability to combine sensual beauty with substance and depth. “The pieces are beautiful to look at, but they speak volumes to serious topics that are interesting. You look at it once and you see one thing, you look at it again and you see another thing. You see more and more as you look more closely. I love that.”
Professional sports has long been a favored subject of Tafa’s and he shared that his fascination began when he was a young boy mesmerized by the soccer great Pelé. “Being a child in Ghana, everybody played soccer and knew about him,” he said. Looking back, Tafa laughed at how he had naively assumed Pelé was a compatriot: “I didn’t know he was from Brazil. I thought he was from Ghana.”
For Tafa, part of the attraction of sports is the grandeur of competition and the outsized personalities of elite athletes. This can be seen in a work like Pelé the King, which captures the precision and electricity of the soccer legend’s iconic bicycle kick. Melting into a background of bright red with one leg outstretched toward a soccer ball, Pelé looks less like a mortal than a deity.
“When I look at sport, there’s this religious aspect to it,” said Tafa. “To me, as religion becomes less and less important to parts of the world, now it seems like sports is the new religion. We have the gods and the deities and the saints at the sports bar. These are the myths and the gods of our times.”
In his artistic practice Tafa thrives on intuition, losing himself while the painting reveals itself to him. One such experience occurred live in front of a fervent audience at Madison Square Garden, when the artist composed a painting of the game while it played out before him. To Tafa, the pressure of combining performance, athletics and his artistic vocation made the experience unforgettable. “It was so intense how everybody was looking at me. It was magical and beautiful.”
Frenzied and exhilarating, yet also calculating and controlled, Tafa’s paintings very much look like the product of a man at one with his canvas. His very diverse output is unified by a singular artistic style that speaks to Tafa’s intense connection to his work. “The painting has its own life, the painting is greater than the artist. So the painting takes you to a different direction from where you want to go. The painting sends me messages. It speaks to me – more than I try to control it, it liberates itself.”
Tafa: The Echoes of Memories is now showing at the Pictor Gallery in New York until 25 February
