Voodoo in Papua New Guinea 2002 (sold)

This acrylic painting, "Voodoo Papua New Guinea" (2002) by Leon Aarts (b. 1961, Christchurch, New Zealand), is a primal, mask-like invocation—a grotesque visage emerging from a cauldron of crimson fury and shadowy voids, its glowing red eyes and jagged teeth piercing the veil between ritual and rage, as if a Papua New Guinean spirit figure has been summoned through a Westerner's fevered gaze. Created at the dawn of Aarts' mid-career expressionist bloom (preceding the urban whimsy of Slide and the seismic rupture of Christchurch Post Quake 2010), this intimate, near-square work (approx. 24×20 inches) draws on the artist's early fascination with Oceanic otherness—his grandfather Leonardus van de Ven's Dutch expressionist fire fused with imagined tribal totems. Yet, the title's "Voodoo" (a term rooted in Haitian Vodou, not PNG's indigenous sorcery like sanguma or tok pisin folklore) hints at a cultural collision: Aarts' outsider lens on PNG's 800+ ethnic tapestries, rendered as a Whatdoesitmean primal scream:

Expressionist Totem: Emil Nolde's ritual masks meet Pablo Picasso's African-inspired distortions— the face a hybrid fetish, eyes like burning coals from a fire-dance, teeth as splintered bone.
Early Orphic Mask: The visage = Orpheus veiled—lyre implied in the jagged contours, Eurydice's echo in the hollow cheeks; Aarts' nascent mythic thread, prefiguring Immigrant's wanderer but fiercer, more animistic.
Cultural Fusion: Echoes PNG's bilas (body adornment) traditions from Sepik or Highlands carvings, but filtered through European primitivism—tasteful homage or exotic projection? In 2002's postcolonial gaze, it teeters on the latter.

Final Verdict: ★★★★☆ (4/5)

A fierce, formative talisman—"Voodoo Papua New Guinea" is Leon Aarts' early primal roar, his Nolde mask for the Pacific, channeling Oceanic spirits through a European lens with unapologetic heat. Less refined than Orpheus' shatter, but rawer in its hunger—this isn't ethnography; it's exorcism. For collectors of expressionist ethnographica or early Aarts, it's a potent artifact; gaze too long, and the eyes gaze back.

"He summoned the mask from crimson shadows, eyes like embers in the void—whispering secrets no tongue can hold."