Blind Spot
Paul Thorel Foundation, Naples
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Little Sambo Goes to War, 2007. Oil and gloss on canvas, 50.7 x 40.6 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Fondazione Paul Thorel, Naples.
Photography © Amedeo Benestante.
Installation view, Blind Spot, Fondazione Paul Thorel, Naples, 2024.
Courtesy Fondazione Paul Thorel, Naples.
Photography © Amedeo Benestante.
Blind Spot: Paul Thorel, Shezad Dawood, Claire Fontaine, Sigmar Polke
Exhibition Blind Spot features a painting by Shezad Dawood titled Little Sambo Goes to War, 2007. The work tells Dawood's biographical story moving between cultures and countries, empire and colony, that pushed him to focus on critiquing binary formulations such as the clash of civilizations between East and West, and to subsequently broaden his research to the structural and systemic conditions that construct the relationship between nature and civilisation in the monumental work Leviathan.
In his work, Dawood employs a multidisciplinary approach, often employing dark humour, to undermine the ideological narratives and conveniences surrounding the numerous overlaps, contradictions and shifts in meaning between apparently competing cultural and political systems. Little Sambo Goes to War, from his early Gothic Western series, is an oil on canvas that seems to respond - with a reversal of perspective - to the archetypal figure of The Warrior, 1993 by Paul Thorel. Dawood's subject is the same, but the contours are barely outlined with strokes of color on a black background that seems to absorb them, and the title is sharp and challenging, drawing attention to persistent racialised tropes aimed at people of colour and indigenous communities alike.
Curated by Sara Dolfi Agostini.