Invasion was commissioned during the 2020 pandemic. The artist chose a subject that spoke to the global moment while utilizing her signature plant forms.
Invasion carries a double meaning in this work. The white flowers play host to tiny organisms that float across the entire space of the canvas. In the background, a rising spiral sucks in a row of purple-gray buildings. Transformed from solid to fluid, they might be reflections in a rising tsunami, referencing a world swept up by the relentless waves of the virus, coming unmoored.
The plants in Fotso’s paintings are always specific, recognizable species
Simultaneously, the work creates a tension between tree and buildings, nature and culture. From this perspective, the growing mass of buildings surges forward, an encroaching city about to engulf the resplendent tree. The relentless human invasion and destruction of nature is a key theme of the artist’s work.
The plants in Fotso’s paintings are always specific, recognizable species: here, an avocado tree (Persea americana). This specificity sets her apart from other Cameroonian artists who also employ plant motifs in their work, such as Barthélemy Toguo or Hervé Yamguen. The avocado tree, native to Central America, is primarily consumed around the world as food, but it has a long if lesser-known history of medicinal use. In Cameroon, its leaves are boiled with other plants and prescribed as a healing concoction.
Healing and the TRANSMISSION OF KNOWLEDGE OF PLANTS
Fotso comes from a family of healers. In her community, the most powerful man in the clan holds and transmits the knowledge of medicinal plants. This was passed on from her grandfather to her great uncle, whom she followed into the forest as he collected bark, roots, leaves, and herbs to prepare traditional medicine. As a child, she would be given these concoctions for tummy aches and other common ailments. These traditional practices continue to exist alongside the hospitals and doctors of western medicine. Despite the vast increase in synthetic medicines, a large part of the world’s population still depends on plant-derived medicines and traditional healing practices continue to be an important component of healthcare in African countries. Avocado, for instance, is used by traditional healers in Cameroon for the treatment of oral diseases because of its anti-inflammatory and anti-fungal properties.
But the forest that provides these useful medicines is threatened. Not only are the ecosystems that supply the plants increasingly endangered through environmental degradation, deforestation, and over-exploitation; but the traditional knowledge of the healing properties of plants, developed over millennia, is at risk of being lost, stored in the memories of elders and transmitted mostly by word of mouth. The artist is on a mission to depict the beauty and fragility of nature, record its irreplaceable utility, and capture the fundamental entanglement of plants with human cultures.
Cool COLORS AND ENergy
The color palette of Invasion is surprising and unusual—Fotso eschews the trademark green we associate with plants and proffers instead a cocktail of brown, purple-gray and gold. The fruit glows with tiny golden specks, tantalizing and precious. In coming up with the colors of her works, Fotso projects herself into the experience of living with them for long periods of time. How do they sustain and delight, without fading into the familiar or crying out incessantly for attention? In Invasion, cool colors dominate, but they are enlivened by the glow of the leaves and fruit and their delicate suggestion of movement. Their golden hues recall the alchemy of plants that convert the energy of the sun into sustenance for almost every other living organism on earth. The leaves and fruit are an energy conductor, a source of power more rooted and stable than the spiral of the human-driven, built environment.
Imbued with very different kinds of energy, wave and tree exist in a precarious balance. The composition makes it hard to identify which overlays and predominates over the other; the play of the lines scrambles the relationship between figure and ground. Suspended between the two, the work invites the viewer to experience the duty of care for the remaining forests that Fotso sees as essential to our wellbeing and survival. Will our cities swallow up what remains of these precious ecosystems, or will we recognize and protect what is at risk of being lost?