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http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/washingtonpost/access/1644636451.html?dids=1644636451:1644636451&FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&date=Feb+13%2C+2009&author=Michael+O%27Sullivan+-+Washington+Post+Staff+Writer&pub=The+Washington+Post&edition=&startpage=T.27&desc=%27Dialogue%27%3A+Revealing+Portraits+of+Africa

'Dialogue': Revealing Portraits of Africa
By Michael O'SullivanFriday, February 13, 2009

Ask any artist whose subject is the human face: What is the point? As most will tell you, it's to go beneath the surface, to reveal the person inside the skin. Aimé Mpane seems to have taken that ambition to another level.
Two walls of wood-panel portraits that the Congolese artist has on view at the National Museum of African Art do just that. The images of human faces are not just painted, but scraped with a blade into the cheap plywood he works with -- in some cases so energetically that nothing is left but a gaping hole where the face would be. In such instances, you don't see the inner person at all, but the wall on which the picture is hung.
Of course, voids tells you something, too. Something about the pressures of poverty that bear down on Mpane's countrymen. (The installation's French title, "Ici On Crève," can be roughly translated as "Here We Are Worn Out.")
Created between 2006 and 2008, Mpane's work is part of a show called "Artists in Dialogue: António Ole and Aimé Mpane." It's the first in a series of two-artist exhibitions that the museum hopes will give like-minded contemporary artists the chance to converse with each other, rather than to soliloquize. The centerpiece of the show, which includes both new and older work from both men, is a pair of site-specific sculptures created just for the exhibit, one by Mpane, and one by Ole, of Angola. The question is: Do they have anything to say to each other?
Both pieces are, unsurprisingly, concerned with surface.
Along one wall, Ole has fashioned an evocation of the shanty-town architecture of the slumlike musseques of his homeland. Fashioned from cast-off doors that have been repainted in candy-colored shades, metal traffic signs and other bits of industrial junk, "Allegory of Construction I" is a vivid and poignant hodgepodge, a smiley face slapped on top of the unhappiness of an underlying social ill.
Running parallel to it, and through the center of the gallery, is Mpane's contribution. Called "Rail, Massina 3" after a commercial strip in Congo's capital of Kinshasa, it's another facade, an almost theatrical parody of the colorful advertisements and shop fronts found there. But there's nothing behind these garish storefronts and their empty doorways -- except Ole's equally fake shanty town. Both works speak to a kind of paradox. Not just between the haves and the have-nots, but between the beautiful and the abject.
It's a dialogue well worth having. And it's continued in some of Ole's other work, as where he spotlights the unexpected visual delights found in bits of trash the artist picks up during walks along the beach near his studio. But it's not, for my money, the most stimulating conversation you'll find here.
At the opposite end of the gallery from Mpane's painted portraits, you'll find several photographic portraits by Ole. Shot between 1973 and 1979, as the artist traveled through Angola documenting his country's transition from colonial rule to independence, the six black-and-white pictures are simple and starkly frontal. His subjects stare out at us -- one through broken eyeglasses -- with a mixture of, as the wall label says, "intensity, dignity and pathos."
Unlike Mpane's portrait subjects, whose faces have been literally incised, the scars on Ole's subjects are invisible. But they are no less painful to look at.



Artists in Dialogue: António Ole and Aimé Mpane Through Aug. 2 at the National Museum of African Art, 950 Independence Ave. SW (Metro: Smithsonian) Contact: 202-633-1000 (TDD: 202-633-5285). http://www.nmafa.si.edu. Hours: Open daily from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Admission: Free.