The figure stands his ground. Dressed in a blue tracksuit and green Nike sneakers, he faces the viewer with arms slightly open, the great globe of red-and-white coiled fire hose filling the picture plane behind him. The coil here is not a serpent attacking from without but a mass the figure has stepped away from, or perhaps stepped out of: the posture is frontal, composed, unhurried. A dollar sign floats at the lower left, quiet and unforced, as if the painter left a note.
The figure stands his ground. Dressed in a blue tracksuit and green Nike sneakers, he faces the viewer with arms slightly open, the great globe of red-and-white coiled fire hose filling the picture plane behind him. The coil here is not a serpent attacking from without but a mass the figure has stepped away from, or perhaps stepped out of: the posture is frontal, composed, unhurried. A dollar sign floats at the lower left, quiet and unforced, as if the painter left a note.
The Mumbo Jumbo series takes its name from Ishmael Reed’s novel of cultural resistance; the fire hose, its recurring instrument, is the object that contains and the object that frees, depending on whose hands hold it. Here the figure is not consumed by the coil but stands before it, the construction-zone stripes at the bottom anchoring him to the street. The dollar sign at the lower edge belongs to Deceus’s semiotic vocabulary: the urban environment rendered not as backdrop but as a system of charged objects, each carrying more than its surface admits.
The figure’s relationship to the coil recalls the formal logic of Romare Bearden, one of Deceus’s stated formation references: the figure assembled from discrete, insistent visual elements against a dense surrounding field, simultaneously constituted by and distinct from the material that surrounds it. In Bearden’s collages the figure is always partly made of the world it inhabits; in Deceus the figure wears that world as clothing, or armor, or both. The coil does not disappear when the figure steps forward. It waits.
