Jean-François Boclé

Manifiesto bananero is a series of 15 drawings by the Martinican artist Jean-François Boclé. In these drawings the artist represents a series of bananas with simple lines of black graphite and sweeping gestural dots of shiny yellow vinyl. From one drawing to another the fruit twists, changes, ripens and moulds itself in different ways to suggest not only the diversity of banana shapes, but also the stages it passes through during its lifecycle. Boclé’s drawings inevitably evoke the famous cover of The Velvet Underground’s first record designed by Andy Warhol in 1967. But unlike Warhol’s banana, where the skin can be peeled off to expose the phallic shape of the fruit (on the first edition of the record there was a removable sticker), Boclé’s paintings make a political statement through the title of the work. Boclé appropriates the “manifesto” here, the classic written vehicle used to make political and artistic public declarations, to suggest a position in relation to a fruit that in the Caribbean context has become a symbol of the exploitation of workers, abuse of the environment and extreme violence.