Created By
Saleh Lô
graphite drawing & acrylic on panel, Graphite drawing and acrylic on found tomato paste cans
Curator
Luke Chapman
In The Red Gold, Saleh Lô orchestrates what I have termed the "contemporary sublime made manifest in the mundane," creating a work that operates simultaneously as analytical apparatus and deeply affective encounter. The installation's grid structure recalls the rational organization of both supermarket shelves and cemetery walls, positioning the viewer within an uncomfortable liminal space where consumption and commemoration intersect. The strategic deployment of portrayed faces across the metallic field disrupts any comfortable aesthetic distance, forcing recognition of the human cost embedded within global commodity flows. This is Lô's most ambitious articulation of "ethical ready-mades"—objects that carry their own moral freight across borders, demanding that we acknowledge the structural violence concealed within everyday consumption. The work participates in what Achille Mbembe identifies as the "entanglement" of African futures with global capital, revealing how the most basic act of sustenance implicates local communities in transnational networks of dependency and exploitation. Red Gold refuses the comfort of pure formalism, insisting instead on the ethical implications of looking, of knowing, of participating in systems that render certain lives visible only through their suffering. The installation stands as archaeological evidence of our present moment's moral failures—a contemporary Guernica that speaks to the quiet persistence of the unspeakable in the global present.
The Red Gold by Saleh Lô manifests as a monumental wall installation that transforms the gallery space into a site of profound economic and ethical interrogation. Hundreds of tomato paste cans—sourced from the ubiquitous Chinese imports that saturate Mauritanian markets—are arranged in a precise grid formation, their golden metallic surfaces creating a shimmering field that recalls both contemporary minimalism and ancient treasure hoards. Interspersed throughout this industrial constellation are intimate portrait drawings of Talibé children, their faces rendered in graphite and occasionally color, each one meticulously affixed to individual can surfaces. The work's title operates with deliberate semantic precision: "red gold" references both the local vernacular for these imported tomato products and their paradoxical value within economies of scarcity and abundance. The installation's architectural logic—its measured repetition and calculated distribution—creates a visual rhythm that oscillates between memorial and marketplace, between individual testimony and collective anonymity. Each can function as both commodity vessels and commemorative tablets, transforming the mundane infrastructure of global trade into what might be recognized as a contemporary reliquary.
Created By
Saleh Lô
164 x 296 cm | 65 x 117 in
2025
