Series: Memories Between Earth And Sky.
Archival pigment print mounted on aluminium Dibond.
Edition of 3
40.6 x 50.8 cm / 16 x 20 in
40.6 x 50.8 cm / 16 x 20 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
Two young people share the simplest luxury — a cone apiece — in front of a candy-striped seaside stall, and Carlos Idun-Tawiah dresses the moment to the nines. He, in an olive waistcoat over a pale pinstripe shirt, leans in to bite the cone down to its tip; she, in a crisp pink oxford and a tartan skirt, throws her head back mid-laugh, her ice cream already melting toward her fingers. The scalloped coral awning and the buttercup-yellow cart frame them like a little proscenium built for delight.
Idun-Tawiah brings a couturier’s attention to texture — the nub of the wool waistcoat, the soft collapse of a washed cotton collar, the plaid’s quiet grid set against pinstripe — and he lets clothes carry character the way a good stylist does. Nothing is fussy; everything is chosen. Part of the picture’s pleasure is the pleasure of watching two people who know exactly how they want to be seen, wearing their vintage elegance as lightly as they wear their happiness.
From “Memories Between Earth And Sky” (2024), the artist’s Senegalese chapter made in Saint Louis, the image trades Accra’s interiors for salt air and horizon. Behind the couple the sea turns hazy and pale, so the whole frame tips toward the two of them and their small, sugary rite. Courtship, friendship, or simply an afternoon — Idun-Tawiah leaves it open — but it is unmistakably a memory being made and, in the same gesture, being kept.