Untitled Miami, Gallery 1957
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Ashanti Blues, a solo exhibition by Kelvin Haizel at Untitled Miami 2025. This presentation showcases a layered and immersive series of recent works, where paint, clay, and thread converge to translate rhythm, memory, and cultural heritage into visual form.
Spanning large-scale canvases that explore texture, color, and materiality, Ashanti Blues embodies the emotional and historical resonance of Ghanaian Highlife music. During the production of this series, Haizel intentionally maintained a constant loop of Highlife in the studio, channeling its energy while engaging with the historical accounts of West African dance bands. The works combine a variety of materials and gestures, resulting in complex visual tones that summon the subconscious, conjure aesthetic habits of infantility alongside learned academic choices, and respond to the cultural landscape of urban life.
Through meticulous processes of stitching, tearing, layering, and tallying, Haizel transforms canvas, threads, and clay into a language of rhythm and presence. Threads break and are counted, canvases are shredded and folded inward, pigments settle into textured surfaces, and subtle tally marks mark gestures of labor and endurance. Repeating drips, stitched seams, and layered clay become visual echoes of musical strings, conveying resonance, silence, and movement without literal depiction. The compositions shift between dynamic motion and contemplative stillness, evoking both improvisation and meditation.
Color plays a central role in Haizel’s visual music. From deep teals, ultramarines, and oxbloods to lighter washes of pastel blues, peaches, and earthy tones, pigments move across the surface like sonic frequencies, tracing the emotional cadences of sound. The interplay of cool and warm tones, concentrated fields of pigment, and subtle bursts of contrasting hues all contribute to a sense of rhythm and pulse—an abstract choreography that mirrors the improvisational qualities of Highlife and the evolution of the Ashanti blues tradition.
As a metaphor, these paintings recall a key cultural shift in the evolution of Ghanaian music: the emergence of “Odonson” or Ashanti Blues in the 1930s, when the Fante osibisaaba replaced the seprewa harp with the guitar. Just as the music adapted and transformed while remaining rooted in tradition, Haizel’s paintings bear the layered marks of time, labor, and cultural memory. Each canvas, in its color, texture, and gesture, embodies a dialogue between ancestral musical heritage, contemporary artistic practice, and the emotional imprint of rhythm in human experience.
Ashanti Blues offers more than visual intrigue—it is a meditation on continuity and transformation, a series where tradition is not preserved but re-sounded, re-felt, and remade.
Through this synthesis of material experimentation, historical reflection, and emotional resonance, Haizel invites the viewer to experience rhythm as both a cultural force and a deeply personal encounter.