Photos of artwork by Matt Nagle
MYTHIC. Nick Butler’s “The Seduction of Europa” is one of the paintings on view at One Heart Café through Aug. 14. In the exhibit entitled “Nuba Mythos,” Butler uses figures from the Nuba mountain region of Africa to illustrate scenes of western mythology.
In a town short on art galleries, where do emerging artists go to show their work? More often than not, it is the owners of coffee houses, tea shops, hair salons, bars and restaurants who – in an act of enlightened generosity – offer up their wall space to the local artists.
It is a wonderfully symbiotic relationship. The establishment’s owner receives a constantly rotating art exhibit to grace the walls and the artist gets the opportunity to have his/her work exposed to the eyeballs of the public.
One Heart Café, nestled comfortably between the Grand Cinema and the Two Vaults Gallery, is one of those havens that gives local artists a chance to show their stuff. The current exhibit features paintings by Nick Butler in a show entitled “Nuba Mythos.”
On the walls of One Heart’s two chambers, Butler has hung a dozen or so canvasses, several of them of monumental proportions. In “Nuba Mythos,” Butler uses African tribal peoples (the Nuba) as the main characters in scenes derived from Greek mythology and Biblical stories.
Butler’s pallet is muted, consisting of earthy reds and browns and dark greens. The only bright colors are the geometric African designs that sometimes occupy portions of the canvas, serving as a device to heighten the African flavor of Butler’s inspiration. Clearly a well-practiced draftsman, Butler works in a loose, fluid style that allows each stroke its own clear existence.
The idea of using tribal figures – tall, slender nudes (mostly females with shaved heads in the Nuban manner) – to depict scenes from western mythology has an interesting effect. Butler is not so much fitting African figures into western theatrical roles as he is giving the stories an African inflection by placing them in an African context.
In his version of “Suzanna and the Elders,” for example, Suzanna is a tribal girl. She is bathing with her water gourd and a basin. The lustful “elders” are European colonialists – a safari man and a priest. Butler’s Suzanna can stand for all of Africa being lusted over by Europe in its quest for empire.
Butler’s Nuban figures are as lyrical and as elongated as the religious figures of El Greco. In “Diana and Actaeon,” a group of figures gathers around the Nuban Diana in a configuration of bodies and limbs as serpentine as figures in a dramatic action painting by Peter Paul Rubens.
Butler’s version of “The Seduction of Europa” features a nude Nuban woman seated comfortably in front of a big, white Nuban bull. The bull’s crescent horns (characteristic of African cattle) are decorated with red flowers. An African village is in the background. “Europa and the Bull” is a popular theme in the canon of western art: depicting the goddess Europa on the back of Zeus who has transformed himself into a white bull to take Europa across the sea to Crete. Butler presents a wonderful African version of the scene using African figures and African cattle.
“Nuba Mythos” is on view through Aug. 14 at One Heart Café, located at 604 Fawcett Ave.
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