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Artist: Gommaar Gilliams

Arusha Gallery presents The Ballad of my Lover’s Boat, a new body of work by Gommaar Gilliams.

Gommaar Gilliams creates bold and vibrant works steeped in rich narratives, engulfing the viewer in a storybook landscape, delighting in the natural, the familiar, the strange and the magical. Gilliams’ works are best understood through a veil of poetry. Each work can be read as a parable, a fable - ways of storytelling we’ve always used to sharel, speak about, explain, unite and pass on - their central subjects rotating between figures, plants, animals and the celestial realm beyond. Through energetic texture and colour, Gilliams forges a link with the past. His motifs and style are informed by an interest in the history of painting, tapping into how humans are constantly drawn to the same symbolic imagery, parables, allegories and notions through history, as if pulled by an invisible thread. Gilliams effortlessly blends elements of European, Eastern and American art, drawing inspiration from a wealth of iconography and cultural history.

The work draws heavily on established mythology, an exploration of that which is possible in an earthly realm, and that which inhabits the spaces of the heroic and ethereal tales passed down from generation to generation. The works, in their resplendent colour, are uplifting and hopeful, yet there exists a vein of deep longing just beneath the surface, as Gilliams conveys themes of wistfulness, nostalgia, childhood innocence and collective memory in all its bittersweetness. His works force their viewers to confront not only history itself, but their own lived experiences, drawing parallels and connections, and bathed in a sense of quiet relatability. There is also an underlying vein of an idyllic world seen through a haze, just out of reach. This arcadian utopia is indelibly marked by melancholic sadness, a revised remembrance of past times, tinged with the rosy haze of recall, coloured by imagination in the face of an unsatisfying present. The work emits a soft spirituality, a living magic, as Gilliams casts a poetic spell over the works, transforming elements and symbols into impactful painterly motifs.