Day Always Comes

Tommaso Corvi-Mora is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Che Lovelace, his first at the gallery. Che Lovelace’s paintings weave stories of life, freedom, and post-colonialism in his native Trinidad into a tapestry of abstracted landscapes, still lives and portraits. As he has said: “One of the things that artists can do is that we can… save something from becoming cliché.”

After an initial refusal to engage with local iconography and subject matter, he decided to instead embrace the landscape, the people, the colours. His depictions of the rhythms of Trinidadian life became informed by his rootedness there, having established his studio on the outskirts of Port-of-Spain. Lovelace likens his material and formal interventions - such as cleaving the canvas into quadrants and dissecting the picture plane - to exploring Caribbean selfhood as an integration of antecedents, as the result of the interaction between different cultures creating a completely new one. Lovelace’s fascination with Caribbean iconography is a metaphorical expedition through postcolonialism, resistance, freedom, mythology and nature. The result is a complex and nuanced expression of his own sense of identity, deeply rooted in the “genius loci”.