The Myth of Inner Landscapes

Black future tuning
the smell of cinnamon and mint

Walking through the sand 
of oblivion
and the footprints 
of loneliness

The pursuit of self 
never suits the lost ones 

This family cohesion
during mami wata season
transformed cowrie shells
to a higher self

I am the epiphany
of the then and the in-between 

Not knowing why the caged birds sing
of your struggle to exist
stuck in portals of the unknown
reminiscing home

I am the silent picture
you almost destroyed 

The flying flower child 
born to the river 
the return of your people's 
people

The africanized sequel
I cymbal_eyes the echo 

Re_percussion: echo echo echo 
earthy and celestial forbidden bliss
I am the nemesis
that bitter-leaf kiss

This is for babies un_born of
tropical air and freshwater by the lagoon

The return of the flying flower child
berbere and cumin fragrances 
ukwaju sipping, gele wearing  
a taste of hope - skontolo

Skin like blackstrap molasses
re_painted the future on sacred canvases

Earth shakes, ground shattering
reincarnated magnificence
when black stars
shine

Black future tuning
the sound of a billion obokano strings

Until the paradise is ours to decorate
like the flying flower child
you were once born of 
earthy and celestial forbidden bliss

Jumoke Adeyanju

Thomias Radin’s paintings are collages of cultural references through which he investigates questions of identity and epistemology. Elements of urban culture, juxtaposed with elements of early-modern European art create a map of aesthetical values that have informed the artist’s practice.  Borrowing to the musical technique of sampling, fragments of these memories and references are reappropriated.

Describing his paintings as depicting ‘internal fights’, Thomias Radin seeks to represent a double-consciousness: one formed through the intellect and one instigated through the physical experience of the Black body. Moving bodies in his paintings, frozen into metaphorical moments, occupy the surreal backdrops of the subconscious. It is not anymore the mind that occupies the body but the opposite. The Western Cartesian experience is disturbed by animated bodies, carriers of another memory. The self comes into existence through the body and the bodily. By performing in front of his paintings, Thomias Radin pursues his aesthetical investigation of the experiences of blackness, Western urbanity and post-coloniality. The dance, the painted representations, the artist’s body and consciousness, the viewers’ bodies and gazes form a constellation of forces feeding the choreography of the artist’s “internal landscapes.”

Thomias Radin is a French painter and performer, born in Guadeloupe in 1993. In 2018 he graduated from the University of Rennes 2 with a Master degree in Fine Arts. In 2015, the creation of his improvisation piece the Myth of a Trinity began, mixing painting, music and dance, in collaboration with the artists Delawhere, Andrège Bidiamambu and Mackenzy Bergile.