As we forgive

By Nicholas Laughlin

Perhaps the most immediately striking work from Nikolai Noel’s solo show Forgiveness — installed in the InterAmericas Gallery at Caribbean Contemporary Arts (CCA7) in Port of Spain from 17 April to 11 May — is the large painting The Moth Arms. On a sheet of paper about three feet wide by nine feet high, rendered in rich colours with heavy black outlines, it seems to mimic an ecclesiastical stained glass window in both dimensions and style, and certainly in subject.

At first glance it appears to depict a crucifixion scene. Except the wooden structure that the half-naked, broken figure hangs from is not a cross, but a simple pole, crowned by a chi-rho, an ancient Christian symbol formed by the first letters of the Greek version of the word “Christ”. The figure’s face is obscured. He wears on his head not a crown of thorns but a sort of skeletal mitre. From a wound on the left side of his torso springs a red hibiscus. In the distance, dark clouds — perhaps rainclouds, perhaps clouds of smoke — partly cover a deep Chartres-blue sky.

At the foot of the pole is a heraldic shield, its upper quarters blazoned with three gold crowns against a red field and a kneeling figure (“Am I not a man and brother?”) against a gold field; in the lower half is a black moth against silver. At the crest is a strange piece of apparatus that could be a whip or a harness, with a spiralling extrusion that mimics the moth’s proboscis. (This object, Noel says, is in fact a harness for riding a moth.) A stylised mantle hangs over the shield, its scarlet colour echoing the hibiscus above, its lappets writhing like reptile limbs. Below appears a motto: “Swallow Without Chewing”.

At my Catholic primary school, we made our First Communion in standard two, when we were eight years old. The girls wore white dresses with little veils, the boys wore white shirts, and we exchanged little cards printed on one side with religious images. Before the day of the ceremony, we had a sort of rehearsal. The school principal, a gentle, smiling Irish nun, showed us how to approach the altar, reverently, with hands clasped; what to say to the priest when he bent down with the sacramental bread. It was most important, she said, that we not chew the consecrated host. This was tantamount to blasphemy. She told us a story about a disobedient child who insisted on chewing, and was struck dead. Puzzled, the doctors cut him open, and found the marks of teeth on his heart.

I thought at once of this story — which must have given me mild nightmares when I was eight — when I read that motto inscribed at the bottom of The Moth Arms, green letters against a gold riband. Later, Noel reminded me that moths also “swallow without chewing”. They slumber by day in secret nooks and folds — “in my mind I associate them with Victorian, regal, grand things, heavy drapery and upholstery” — at night they fling themselves into the small infernos of artificial lights, and their wings are coasted with pigmented dust like the cryptic residue of old beliefs and ideas.

“My work is always about the uncomfortable things,” Noel says, “ethnicity, politics, and religion.” Born in Trinidad in 1976, he is one of a group of restless, ambitious younger artists — like his friends Jaime Lee Loy and Marlon Griffith — negotiating ther way through the Anglophone Caribbean’s most lively and eclectic art scene, provoked equally by the groundbreaking works of the generation of contemporary artists who emerged in Trinidad in the late 1980s and by the global datastream of ideas and images flooding through the Terra Nova of the Internet. But Noel is also clearly influenced, in style and substance, by the old-masterly tradition of Western European art — he cites Leonardo’s drawings and the paintings of Caravaggio and Goya when he talks about the evolution of Forgiveness.

In 2004 he installed a group of three works in the foyer at CCA7. One large painting, Deity, depicts an androgynous, twelve-armed, saffron-skinned being within a ring of fire, performing what could be a dance of creation, or of destruction. The Universal Christ Revolver/Adaptor flirts cheekily with the kinetic (and with blasphemy), offering a sort of do-it-yourself saviour. The biggest of the three works, The Parade of the Crabs Featuring the True Baphomet Augmented, structurally resembles a Renaissance altarpiece, but in the arched central panel, which might be expected to contain an image of Christ or the Virgin, there is instead an animal-headed, serpent-tongued monster with a scarred torso, writhing against a wooden post as it rises from the sea. On the side panels, instead of attendant angels, are eight stampeding half-human, half-crab creatures. Are they worshipping an obscene idol, or mocking a martyred Caliban? The composition also hints, leeringly, at Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, with “the True Baphomet” emerging from the sea foam in place of the goddess of love, welcomed not by Zephyrs and Graces but by the “crabs”, in a shocking metamorphosis.

Noel’s Deity, Christ Revolver, and Parade of Crabs slyly borrow and adapt the iconography of several major religions, classical tradition, and “universal” pop culture, raising questions about a new order of myth that is also a New World synthesis. These works seem to ask, if we do need gods, why not invent our own? And what would they look like? Three years later, Forgiveness narrows and sharpens the focus of these questions.

“The purpose of my work is to question the way we structure our civilisation,” he says — a huge claim. “I am interested in the millions of years of occurrences that brought us to this point . . . Why are the institutions that govern the world we know, the institutions that govern the world we know?”

The history of colonial exploitation in the Caribbean is inextricably bound up with the propagation of the Christian religion: this is not news. Christianity was method, motive, and justification for historical sins of every hue. It was, furthermore, the perfect belief system for a plantation economy that depended on the soul-killing, back-breaking labour of a permanent bonded class. All suffering in this life can and must be borne for the sake of eternal bliss in the next.

Nor is it surprising that, long after colonial flags were furled and colonial battalions retreated, colonial religion remains rooted in Caribbean soil. Sexual mores are mired in religious hypocrisy. Prime ministers believe themselves appointed by divine authority. Visiting American televangelists are greeted with the kind of frenzied adoration once reserved for lesser members of the royal family.

Noel doesn’t chart this landscape, but it is the background to his work. It comes into clearest relief in The Beggars Couch, a group of four paintings of varying size, arranged in a pattern that hints at the cruciform. In the central panel, a half-naked man with green-tinted (or -tainted) skin reclines against a bank of red roses and yellow daisies. The image is abruptly cropped, so that his arms are cut off below the elbows, his legs below the knees. His lips are pulled back in a grimace, or a sardonic smile. Two panels on either side depict a pair of open hands — do they belong to the green man? — in huge close-up, out of proportion. It is impossible to read their gesture exactly — outstretched in supplication? Raised in defiance? Or are they about to be nailed to a cross? Above, on the smallest panel, is a crown of gold and red velvet, streaming rays of red and gold and blue that suggest the overlapping crosses of the Union Jack. Below the crown, an unfurling scroll reads: “in the service to bring glory to those other than yourself”.

Who is this beggar, and what parable or beatitude does he belong to? For what sin does he wait to be forgiven?

What most fascinates me about these works is what also most frustrates. Noel is creating an iconography for an invented and not yet fully revealed mythical system, drawing on and subverting a two-thousand-year-old tradition of Christian art. The works in Forgiveness recall painted icons, altarpieces, stained-glass windows, the Stations of the Cross; but whereas a congregation in a Christian church can tap into generations of received knowledge to interpret the symbols around them, viewers of Noel’s paintings and drawings confront a series of deliberate mysteries (joyful, sorrowful, glorious, or — ?). In any Catholic cathedral in any country in the world, a red rose is a sign of martyrdom, a lamb is Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God, Christ himself. But in the small gallery at CCA7, what is a red hibiscus a sign of? What or who is the moth that flits among these works, and achieves a kind of transfiguration in the black-and-white painting The Great White Moth? What gate is guarded by these Angels at Attention, wearing blank-eyed gas masks and tattoos on their feet? Our guesses and questions fix us in a twilit place between confusion and comprehension.

Noel adds: “We need things to not understand.”

The Moth Arms (2007), acrylic on paper