John Bailly: Paintings
crossroad at the tender bridge
BY TERRY REY, Ph.D.
Catalogue Essay for John Bailly: Crossroads at the Tender Bridge at MDC Kendall Campus Art Gallery, June 11, 1999 – July 9, 1999.
The great Senegalese poet Senghor once wrote, “I always confuse birth and death, which seem to me bound together by a tender bridge.” A spontaneous merger of creative genius and the profoundest sensitivity to the contradictory absurdities of modern life spawned such at once haunting and hopeful insights from the African’s pen. A parallel dialectic transforms such insights into imagery in the paintings of John Bailly, whose talent, London birth, Lyon childhood, and Miami ascent into manhood – all conditioned, as it were, by the pilgrim artists’ questful descents into such explosively artful worlds as Mexico, Kongo, and Haiti –unfold into an offering to us of a vision of that tender bridge that so wholly spans our world, shading all but the Senghors from its view.
For the proletariat of Liverpool, soccer, as much as religion, is the opium. Yet what Marx missed about religion, Bailly sees in the universal sport (in Liverpool’s case, soccer, in Nike’s case, exploitation), namely that the very forces that tend to alienate humanity are themselves capable of sowing the seeds of hope and perhaps revolution – that from the depths of human despair spring the flights of aspiration and dignity. In the names of 96 humans crushed to death at their shrine in the form of a northern English soccer stadium, in Liverpool soccer hero Robbie Fowler’s Christ-like expression of solidarity with the Liverpudlian dock worker, in the overarching frame of it all by the Kongolese encircled cross, in thousands of brush strokes that bring color and form the sighs of the forgotten and the remembrance of the triumphant, Bailly brings us to the foot of the tender bridge, face to face with the crossroads before us and within, with the brutal truth of our existential sociality, and the boundless hope of all before and within that is spirit – spirit that is misery-effacing hope.
For the enslaved of colonial and ante-bellum America, the halls of independence were but the cotton fields of imprisonment, the hypocrisy of which would become the tacit mantra of corporate America, the golden calf of generations of enterprising Americans from the carpet-bagger to the yuppie, from the Sooner to the post-Hurricane Andrew itinerant roofer in Miami. On a day when The Miami Herald and countless other dailies herald the strength of the U.S. economy, Bailly’s John Brown’s Vision cries foul, signaling at once our forgetfulness and complicity, our grounding in freedom and blindness to pain – signaling also that the American vision is as much Brown’s as it is Jefferson’s, as much Rodney King’s as Bill Gates’.
A gripping intensity pervades Bailly’s work, wherein artistry, awareness, and persistent labor revolt, attract, and awaken our sense that we are, as Sartre proclaimed, “doomed to be free,” yet with identities that depend upon the social and on scarcity for their definition – that we are children of some deity who could accept one but not the other child’s sacrifice, though each is cast in the maker’s image. That tender bridge from Cain to Abel, from Jefferson to Brown, from docker to sports star, from death to birth, self to social, mystery to truth, the boundless to the bound, from hopeless suffering to the grace of silent aspiration, from paint to canvas – here in Bailly’s finest work waltzes imagery across Senghor’s bridge, as tender as it is shaken, as shady as imposing. Here we glimpse that somewhere at heart the mourner smiles if but for the blessed realization that all are bound for the crossroads that delineate the tender bridge’s span.
Terry Rey is a Professor in the Religion Department at Temple University. Dr. Rey specializes in the anthropology and history of African and African diasporic religions, having over ten years of field experience in Zaire and Haiti. He is currently finishing two books on Caribbean immigrant religion in Miami. After these, he intends to focus his research on the various roles of religion in the Second Congo War (1998-2003) and its aftermath, and on the history and development of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
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