A figure in a blue tracksuit perches at the summit of a great coiled tower, the fire hose stacked in ascending rings of red and white beneath him like a spiraling throne. The warm yellow ground and the terracotta pedestal below give the composition an almost ceremonial quality: this is not a scene of entrapment so much as a momentary coronation. The figure has climbed to the top of the thing that was supposed to contain him and claimed the highest point as his own.
A figure in a blue tracksuit perches at the summit of a great coiled tower, the fire hose stacked in ascending rings of red and white beneath him like a spiraling throne. The warm yellow ground and the terracotta pedestal below give the composition an almost ceremonial quality: this is not a scene of entrapment so much as a momentary coronation. The figure has climbed to the top of the thing that was supposed to contain him and claimed the highest point as his own.
The fire hose is the central motif of Deceus’s Mumbo Jumbo series, named for Ishmael Reed’s 1972 novel in which “Jes Grew,” a metaphorical epidemic of Caribbean and Black cultural vitality, spreads through American society despite every institutional effort to suppress it. Reed understood that the instruments of suppression are also instruments of everyday life: the fire hose that cooled inner-city children in summer is the same instrument turned on Civil Rights marchers. Deceus makes that double-bind the structural logic of the series.
Beneath the painting’s visible surface, at the base of the canvas, drawn marks and inscriptions are held in the substrate: a subterranean notation that the painter sustains across the series. Édouard Glissant called this principle opacity, the right of the Caribbean subject to maintain sign systems that resist full legibility to the outside eye. The figure atop the coil addresses one register; what lies beneath addresses another. Formally, the coiling compositional logic carries an echo of Norman Lewis, one of Deceus’s own stated formation references, whose late abstractions built turbulent fields from accumulating marks that simultaneously evoke and resist figuration. The figure inhabits that same threshold: fully present, and shaped by the forces that surround him.
