Series: Hero, Father, Friend.
Archival pigment print mounted on aluminium Dibond.
Edition of 3
40.6 x 61 cm / 16 x 24 in
Hand-signed by the artist, with title, date, and edition number inscribed in ink on an archival label affixed to the reverse side of the mounted photograph
© The Artist
Everything in Blue is built around a refusal to let the two windows speak to each other directly. The man in the grey suit leans out on his folded forearms, ring catching the light, his smile aimed left; the two schoolgirls in the far window laugh upward and away, toward the cyan and yellow balloons that lift past the painted seam. The picture stages a connection it never quite closes — three glances that almost meet across a flat field of turquoise, held apart by the very wall that frames them.
That wall is the work's governing decision. Carlos Idun-Tawiah flattens a train carriage into a single painted plane, lets the brushed-out band of sky-blue run ragged along the top edge, and cuts his figures into two neat apertures like images mounted on a board. It is tableau logic: the human warmth is real, but the composition is unmistakably constructed, each window a separate exposure of feeling balanced against the next. The balloons, tethered just out of the children's reach, do the quiet structural work — drawing the eye up and out of the rectangle, turning a static wall into a scene about anticipation.
This is the register in which Idun-Tawiah, born 1997 in Sekondi-Takoradi and now working from Accra, has positioned himself: the staged photograph as a vehicle for collective memory, drawing on the studio lineage of Barnor, Keïta and Sidibé while speaking fluently in the language of contemporary art photography. Joy here is not caught but designed — and the design is what makes it hold.