Rex Dixon

Promised land

Submitted byJeeraik009 onFri, 09/21/2012 - 12:16

Today, Rex Dixon's abstract paintings are full of Trinidad 'joie de vivre' so different from his brooding, graffiti covered surfaces when he first came to the Caribbean almost 30 years ago. These are effervescent, lava-like, hot colour canvases that reflect little of his earlier experiences in places with trauma and internal strife. His first home in the region was Jamaica where his naughts, crosses and bloody symbols inspired by Belfast and Northern Ireland's civil war found parallels with the political violence in Kingston during that time. This week, Dixon returns to Belfast with art work at the James Wray Gallery that shows how much life and his mood have changed in the past three decades. These brilliant canvases seem to have come full circle returning to Rex's pop art origins: they brim with optimism and a hope for better times.

Rex Dixon

As a youth, Rex Dixon first attended art college in Stourbridge, he was part of that initial wave of working-class students who recognized their difference when confronted with middle-class dominated art institutions. His preference for abstraction as expounded by the American action painters can be seen as an early decision in favour of Internationaliam, rather than British parochialism, and the confinement that that represented. A later decision to live in Ireland and Jamaica teaching, and now Trinidad, underscored his ability to identify with other cultures outside of his own, with little remorse.