The Brooklyn Rail

When the Berlin-based artist Xavier Robles de Medina was about eight years old, he presented the contents of a thick, red family photo album to his elementary school class in Paramaribo, Suriname. Flipping through dozens of black-and-white photographs, he explained how his grandfather created the well-known bronze statue of the country’s former prime minister, Johan Adolf Pengel, in the city’s Independence Square back in the early 1970s. Robles de Medina, now in his mid-thirties, recently included the same album in a solo exhibition at a gallery in Berlin last spring. While visitors were invited to look through the album itself, they could also take home a complete facsimile in the form of Pengel, a limited-edition artist’s book that he put together. Augmented with a brief introduction and a diversity of oral histories by members of the artist’s family, the book is simultaneously a family scrapbook, a document of an important moment in Surinamese history, and a conceptual artwork.

Stuart Robles de Medina’s nearly twelve-foot-tall statue of Pengel was unveiled on June 5, 1974, the fourth anniversary of the politician’s untimely death from sepsis. While in office during the latter half of the 1960s, Pengel empowered Suriname’s multicultural population to embrace its identity outside of the country’s prevailing Dutch colonial context. Although his government was overthrown in 1969, Pengel remained a beloved figure and became symbolic of the country’s fight for independence. When it was installed, the sculpture shared what was then known as Orange Square with a much smaller statue of Wilhelmina, former Queen of the Netherlands. On the eve of Surinamese independence in November 1975, Stuart Robles de Medina and a few assistants removed the statue of Wilhelmina from the square in the middle of the night, ostensibly so that it wouldn’t be defaced in the festivities the following day. As a sculptor of public monuments, Stuart Robles de Medina’s interdependent acts of adding to and removing from Orange Square echo the postcolonial evolution of Suriname in the twentieth century.

In the exhibition last spring, the album was paired with a large, intricately detailed white, black, and gray acrylic painting depicting the removal of Queen Wilhelmina’s statue. Stuart Robles de Medina appears in the lower right of the composition, guiding the removal. This work is indicative of the painstakingly rendered paintings and drawings that the younger Robles de Medina has focused on for the past decade. Referencing images sourced from the internet or archives, both public and personal, these works read as low resolution at first glance—closer to a photocopy than an Ingres. Robles de Medina found the photograph that inspired this painting in the archives of the Stichting Surinaams Museum, which is located in the former Dutch fort in Paramaribo where his grandfather relocated the statue back in 1975. The artist presents the circumstances in his painting at face value, allowing the viewer to extrapolate the undercurrents of societal change within.

Robles de Medina’s approach is similar in Pengel. In the first half of the book, his grandfather’s album is reproduced in its entirety. The images tell a compelling story on their own, from a striking series of Pengel’s statue being unveiled in Orange Square to intimate snapshots of Stuart, his father René, his son Amedeo (Robles de Medina’s father), and others working on it together over two years; the sculpture is the only large-scale bronze fabricated in Suriname to date. The back half of the book is text-based and split into three sections: a transcription of Stuart speaking about the project a year before his death in 2006; a recent conversation between Robles de Medina, his father Amedeo, and his grandmother Barbara; and brief comments from all four of them on the images in the album. These texts, presented first in Dutch and then in English, add rich texture to the photographs. Not only do they offer insight into the sociopolitical realities of Suriname at the time when the sculpture was made, but they provide glimpses into the key roles that members of the Robles de Medina family played in its creation. For instance, each morning René brought fresh, warm buns from a Chinese bakery to the studio. Robles de Medina does not analyze the significance of the sculpture in Pengel, rather he allows the photographs and oral histories to speak for themselves. This is not a tribute nor a monograph, but a memorialization and a continuation of a familial artistic practice.

The book’s spine reads “★ Stuart Robles de Medina ★ Pengel ★ 1974 ★,” suggesting that perhaps Robles de Medina’s grandfather is in fact its author. He is certainly more than just its subject, with his words and images filling its pages. Either way, the younger Robles de Medina’s artistic vision infiltrates every nook and cranny of the book. While none of his own paintings, drawings, sculptures, or analysis appear in Pengel, Robles de Medina’s act of creating this book is simultaneously an acknowledgement of the personal artistic debt he owes to his grandfather and a means of ruminating on postcolonial identity, which lies at the heart of his practice. By using his platform to present his grandfather’s artistic achievement, Robles de Medina reveals the crux of his own.