Genesis Tramaine

This review is featured in Almine Rech Magazine #39

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Question: how to represent a face? This question relates to art history, of course, but also to the history of what the West has called “mankind.” We know that the face is a sign of humanity. In classical painting, portraits were often reserved for religious, royal, or upper-class figures. A portrait is not just an artistic commission, but has also served to embody a certain idea of humanity in the Western philosophical tradition.

But what about those who have been excluded from this definition? Those who, even today, are denied a face, and therefore denied dignity—if they aren’t purely and simply refused any possibility of representation? The face, as a space of representation, can be made, but also unmade. It is a place marked by power, a space of emancipation for all those who have been classified with the inhuman. The face is language. It is therefore a political space.

Entering Genesis Tramaine’s exhibition 'Facing Giants’ 'at the Consortium, we are met with sentences across the white walls, near faces of saints and apostles painted by the artist. Brief phrases, marring the wall until we remember what they must shout. Words chanted like a prayer, calling to us and teaching us to face the giants, to face the world. 

The artworks also speak up. Through their blocks of bright colors and their faces that resist representation. Multiple faces that frame no figure, but instead open up to a proliferation of forms. These paintings are appeals or prayers. And it’s not by chance that the artist sometimes uses holy water in her materials (this recalls the spiritual dimension of her images).

Here I could bring up the whole history of painting—images, icons, and their role in the European artistic tradition. But let’s change direction—time to pivot! Let’s talk instead about the sacred in the cultures of the Americas—the cultures that came about on the plantation. Let’s talk about Genesis Tramaine’s paintings from a vantage point of other cultural traditions. Let’s talk about Black diasporas, about the colonial politics that tried so hard to erase any trace of the sacred in colonized spaces—without ever managing to do so (because the body remembers).

Genesis Tramaine’s paintings testify to this other form of the sacred, communicated in Black diasporic cultures through murmurs, small gestures, sounds, and silences where everything is said without being explicitly expressed, inflections that are held close, gestures that are passed down with no precise date of origin. Genesis Tramaine’s artworks watch. They watch over what still escapes expression. 

This presence, so difficult to represent, is precisely what resists being named.
Something invisible that escapes, a divine presence that the artist seeks tirelessly to summon.

Isn’t this what art tries to approach? This invisible thing—whatever name we give it—that is the subject of the philosophy of art. The artist tries to approach a form of transcendence, but a transcendence that is much more material than we may think. A transcendence that is also more trans. When we examine it more closely, the very idea of incarnation is a trans notion, insofar as it designates the movement from the spiritual to the material, and vice versa. Materialization. Idealization. Trinity.

Ultimately, Genesis Tramaine’s art, as well as her faces, may be this: a trans-transcendence.