Out of Africa by way of Cuba

THIS ARTIST is a Cuban, but specifically Afro Cuban, and his allegiances lie heavily with African culture according to the catalogue, he has been "initiated in Palo Monte, an Africa diaspora religion sourced in an area of northern Angola and southern Zaire known as Kongo". With the heavyweight African exhibition still running in London, this is all very courant, and the imagery which Bedia uses is obviously indebted to fetishes, to shamanism, to native African art, even to graffiti, with occasional interjections of Latin American surrealism.

Superficially, there is a good deal in his style which parallells the earlier work of Michael Mulcahy and there are even some curious resemblances to the paintings by Patrick Graham shown quite recently in this same gallery.

Mulcahy, of course, has studied and experienced African culture at first hand, but this new wave of primitivism and interest in indigenous religions appears to be allied closely to New Age religiosity, in fact to be an intrinsic part of it. Folk cultures everywhere, after all, tend to be surprisingly alike in many ways, and the same legends and myths turn up all over the globe.

Bedia's paintings are stark, ritualistic and slightly sinister, with a notable bias towards black and white in fact, there is relatively little colour in the conventional sense, apart from isolated, plume like areas of blue which are rather like Cy Twombly's floating abstract shapes. One portrays a ceremonial dance, another translates as Bear Mountain and another as Bear/Bull. Another shows (in attenuated form, rather like cave art) native prostitutes, and in Mister White four natives queue up patiently while a man in white colonial garb talks imperiously on the telephone. The aggressively frontal, often macabre images are jolted out of orbit slightly by the inclusion of fragments of modern photographs, perhaps silk screened and with the formal/informal effect of collage.

That Cuba has a flourishing Afro Cubano culture is well known witness the poetry of Nicolas Guillen, a key figure in Caribbean culture, and much of its music. As with Guillen, Bedia's style is highly sophisticated, but it is not tamed or hybrid it is rather a cross breeding of folk and primitive imagery with a modernist technique and modernist vocabulary. His subject matter is rather limited and almost oppressive, but he employs it with a deliberately simplified, concentrated force and a very individual imagination. He has, too, a highly developed and very eloquent sense of line.