Untitled

SEQUINS
Marepe’s drawings are almost childish, like kiddies’ singsongs.
They are sparkling in their colour, spilt on the paper like stains and fine like hair.
His sculpture is something else: powerful and assertive and with the scale of a building, or a street or a beach. Sometimes it has walls, doors, tyres and chairs, bottles of rum, umbrellas. Sometimes they look like bits of a shanty, kids and bar-room chats.
Not the drawings. Particularly these, sequins and bright shining things covering the surface, playful like games. In other series Marepe’s drawings are stamps, multiplying signs, carousels. An apparently childish game that ends up being something else runs through all this, sometimes something very serious, political and active.
Not these. They are fragile, put together, enchanting and impossible to reproduce in the improbability of their colours and their vibration.
They are drawings that one likes, or one doesn’t, but which accept being told for liking, like sweets.
Susan Sontag wrote in 1964 that there was no need for hermeneutics of Works of art anymore. What we did need was an erotics. It is that erotics that these drawings aim at, because their vibration echoes on the surface of the skin, like a breath.

Delfim Sardo