Aaron Ford
Meninx | Xxija Hii | March 7th - April 5th 2025
Meninx
I wondered how many of us, in the palm of a precarious present, have encountered the colour purple, absorbing it in the retina of our eyes, while being unsuspectedly oblivious to its origin? This rumination is not so much of a mis-education as it is an independent lacuna. I vacillated, caught between the tenacious hold I have on my culture and this untranslatable failure. It was time to vivify and dialogue with the clarity of my discoveries, to bestir the mind from its inertia.
In this quest, to think is to question both exhaustive and cursory taxonomies, a history that has been quartered between centre and periphery. I sit surrounded by indications, racing through my direction, as I attempt to catch hold of each idea that passes, unordered yet intertwined, all of which inform my understanding of Ford’s work. I first traced the etymology of the word meninges: plural “meninges,” singular “meninx,” a Greek term meaning “membrane,” first used by Erasistratus in the third century B.C. to describe a membranous tissue of the central nervous system. A second thread leads us to Meninx, located in the southern part of the Tunisian island of Djerba, an important metropolis in Roman North Africa—a harbour and seaport founded by the Phoenicians, and one of the largest production sites of the ancient dye known as Tyrian purple. Yet, there is a stark contrast between its historical significance and the limited understanding of its legacy. Another notable mythological thread traces the origin of this dye to Hercules’s dog, discovering it by biting into a sea snail (species: Murex). Homer used the term haliporphyros, ‘sea-purple’, when referring to this dye and, according to Pliny the Elder, the finest Tyrian purple in Africa was produced in Meninx. Each Murex snail yielded only a few drops of the precious secretion, requiring thousands of snails to produce even a moderate amount. Interestingly, the verb porphyrô meant “to rise seething, to be agitated,” invoking both the turbulent sea and the restlessness of the heart. The saturated chroma of the sea —refracted into this exhibition’s fabric— speaks not only to the dye’s profound historical and cultural significance, but also to the way in which such visual and physical migration has been harnessed in Ford’s work, while its mysticism and efflorescence carry us ashore.
“Seas, across you my silence patiently rekindles…Every bush of memory hides a ready shot”.
A thread connecting the historical to the contemporary is the revival of this practice by the sole Tunisian producer of Tyrian purple, Mohammed Ghassen Nouira, who honours his Carthaginian ancestors, with the dye lending itself to some of Ford’s compositions. The sweeps of his brushwork resist a subordination to the obsolete use of trompe l’oeil. His figures hover, locked in a freeze-frame, in a hushed arrest, gliding over shifting swathes of blues and purples as they foam against a translucent background. This effect blurs and digs into the glass pieces, casting shadows that seem to emerge from their patina—mysterious, anonymous, yet incomprehensibly penetrating the wells of our unconscious. Do they gloss an analogous sense of uncertainty? Are they punctuated by an inevitable mutation? We remain unsure whether they herald familiarity or strangeness. They may appear as glimmerings of some fictive, inanimate signs, but they need not be; they are murmurs of Ford’s fascination with the traversal of iconographic signifiers. Yet, they are anchored in the present; they perforate temporality despite their anachronism. This inevitably recalls the notion of art historian Aby Warburg’s Nachleben—the survival, the continuity or afterlife and metamorphosis of images and motifs. “Nachleben”, this word that signifies “afterlife” or “living afterwards”, suggests that a being from the past never truly ceases to exist and its return to our memory becomes urgent. In this sense, Ford does not simply frequent the discipline of painting; his work always synthesizes in contact with other fields—something I learned through interaction with Ford in Tunis.
At the juncture of comfortable knowledge, this exhibition may appear commemorative, even elegiac—but I would deem that as reductive. I would instead suggest to leap forward, to look at it from the lens of the “production of the unconscious” that “brings into play very different regimes of signs”, and which “has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo”. He is not sublimating an epoch but witnessing it with reverence, locating himself within it with latency. The ambiguous temporal dynamics at play in these snippets flood my comprehension, leading me to question whether they are reciprocally exclusive. Our gaze rests on the quiet intimacy of a family beach day, the solemnity of an ancient public sculpture within a museum, the repose of a dog in tranquil slumber placed on real murex shells—fragments of the personal and the ancient, of the tangible and the phantasmal, excavated from his memory. Yet, the passage of time does not consign them into decay. These images will endure, in perpetuity, whether we behold them or not, whether we attempt to untangle or signify them in the recesses of our imaginations.
Text by Racha Khemiri | Tunis | February 2025.
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References:
1. Tahar, Sami Ben, and Stefan Ritter. Studies on the Urban History of Meninx (Djerba): The Meninx Archaeological Project 2015-2019. 2022.
2. Stieglitz, Robert R. “The Minoan Origin of Tyrian Purple.” The Biblical Archaeologist, vol. 57, no. 1, Mar. 1994, p. 46.
3. Boisacq, Émile. Dictionnaire Étymologique De La Langue Grecque: étudiée dans ses rapports avec les autres langues indo-européennes, 1950, , pp. 805-809.
4. Glissant, Édouard. Black Salt: Poems. 1998, p. 21.
5. Didi-Huberman, Georges. The Surviving Image: Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms : Aby Warburg’s History of Art. Penn State UP, 2018, p. 16.
6. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Bloomsbury Publishing, 1988. pp. 18-25.
