Scratching at the struggle behind female faces
• Cape Town artist defies trends and uses graffiti techniques and classic portraiture to reflect the inner strength and burdens of black women
You wouldn’t guess by looking at Dion Cupido or his art that he is defying the strictures of his gender. He looks kind of macho, his appearance shaped by a hiphop aesthetic.
The day we meet in his studio in Kensington in Cape Town, he’s in an all-black outfit, trainers and a baseball cap. The thick-rimmed glasses are the only nod to his arty inclinations. This street vibe infiltrates his art through graffiti flourishes.
Growing up in Mitchells Plain he dabbled in tagging walls, but he was clearly talented enough to follow a more traditional route in visual expression, though he did not have an opportunity to refine it through formal education.
This has kept him on the periphery of the art world, although his work sells well.
Beyonce famously snapped up one of his paintings during a visit to SA.
His isolation is partly selfinflicted — he admits to being a bit antisocial and he recognises that his art is not fashionable.
His aesthetic and abilities align him with some of the bestselling (though least spoken about) artists in the country, such as Lionel Smit, who also focuses on rendering a coloured female face, and Kilmany Jo Liversage, whose practice is also a fusion of traditional painting and urban art.
Cupido’s motivation sets him apart. He is out to make plain his feelings – even though he portrays them through female subjects. It is commonplace for male artists to focus on female subjects — and pretty ones at that.
His latest exhibition, Plain Reality, which opened at Worldart gallery in Cape Town last week, is brimming with paintings of beautiful female faces.
He doesn’t portray their bodies, so although he lingers on their beauty, they are not objectified. He applies graffiti techniques to his images, disrupting the portraiture genre. Treating the canvases or boards as walls in an urban landscape, he works lines, scratches and letters into the surface of the paintings.
The driving motivation behind his art is apparent in the expressions on the faces of his subjects. Despite using large canvases, he isolates the faces, which highlights the emotional states revealed by expression.
It is hard to look at some of his portraits and equally hard to look away as it is easy to identify the states he has translated. Sadness, agony, rejection, betrayal, disappointment and a sense of failure pervade the works.
“I know they are dark. People have told me that before,” says Cupido.
The industrial-park setting of his studio is fitting; like his neighbours — furniture makers and the like — he is in the business of crafting a sellable product.
“Some people think we do art for the sake of art. This is a fairytale mindset. I don’t focus on making something that I can sell, but I am mindful that what I can make, can sell.”
His frankness is refreshing, as is his approach. Despite the “pretty” (and maybe vacuous, some might say) veneer of his work, he is not interested in facades — particularly macho ones. He rejects the ways in which masculinity relies on maintaining toughness.
“Men don’t cope better than women. I have seen guys shattered. We look strong, but we aren’t,” he says.
“We distract ourselves with pleasures and sports and whatever keeps you busy. Women talk, men don’t.”
What turned Cupido into a “talker” and a seemingly enlightened and evolved man? It seems to have been a combination of growing up in a female-headed home and years of psychotherapy. He identifies with women – their inherent strength and their struggle for life and dignity in a society dominated by racist and patriarchal ideologies.
Cupido only represents black women in his art – he wants to make them visible, acknowledge their beauty and strength but also the burdens they carried and overcame. He found his subjects through an open call on Facebook and was struck by the fact that they were unaccustomed to thinking of themselves as beautiful — and how this was so essential to feeling validated in the world.
“Men don’t pay so much attention to whether they look good or whether other people think so,” he says.
In Cupido’s hands, the photographs of his subjects become monumental. Some appear like religious icons, with an air of sacrifice or tragedy, or glowing in a light.
Some appear like fashion models in a magazine spread, with gold or decontextualised backgrounds rooting them in a space of fantasy.
They are all caught up in a transcendental state, although the heavy emotions that mark their faces suggest they are earthbound.
Cupido admits that his female portraits could be selfportraits as each woman is revealing a different emotion that grips him when he has a paintbrush in his hands.
He is not as brave as he appears; he has channelled uncomfortable emotions into something beautiful, sometimes even sexy.
“I don’t want people to be hanging my issues on their walls,” he quips.
DESPITE USING LARGE CANVASES, HE ISOLATES THE FACES, WHICH HIGHLIGHTS THE EMOTIONAL STATES
● Plain Reality shows at Worldart Gallery, Cape Town, until end of March.