Black Baroque

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Kajahl’s portraits combine iconography from African, Asian, European, and Pre-Columbian traditions. His process entails sifting through history, both amassing and archiving imagery ranging from ancient art, vintage ethnography, historical portraiture and landscape. Through the medium of oil painting, Kajahl depicts a range of figures elevated to an iconic status, including alchemists, astronomers, dignitaries, navigational explorers and majestic deities.

For Kajahl, painting is a place where we can traverse different cultures and temporalities as a way to challenge our ideas about how we see ourselves and others. His work questions the boundaries of identity by treating painting as a site where radical mixtures, overlooked history and speculative fiction come into play. His paintings take us to a time before race existed by opening up to the chaos and complexity, expanding the periphery around how we perceive ourselves in the past and present day. The figures themselves are semi fictional, composed of artifacts from history, yet in their totality, do not represent figures from real history.