Royal Specter provides a portal into a realm where the artist’s own Royal Court of Sovereign Entities reside. Kajahl depicts this elite class of courtly nobility through the medium of oil painting. Images of the Blackamoor are used as source material, now reanimated through elegant paintings of warriors, scholars, scientists and oracles, all rendered with painstaking detail and elevated to a grandiose status. Disconnected from their original historical context, these Blackamoor sculptures are reimagined through a hybridized narrative, creating fantasy paintings about a fantasy.
Expounding the notion of inaccuracy and fantasy, Kajahl sets the stage for anachronisms and speculative fiction to lie bare, amplifying the indeterminacy of such foreign realms. Large-scale depictions of a scantily clad ‘Huntress’ figure appear astride a snarling crocodile, festooned in gold jewelry and a feathered headdress, and armed with a shield and spear in hand. While an aggrandized figure of an astronomer gazes in solitude through an elaborate astrolabe, surrounded by his celestial globe and tools to help navigate explorations through the constellations. Kajahl manipulates the raw Blackamoor material in order to create a scene that diverges in time and place, effectively creating a hypothetical world for these statues to exist as people. They are reborn as theoretical rulers in a bygone era, with Kajahl positioned as the appointed ‘court painter’ of their mythical domain.
This Royal Court of Sovereign Entities creates a complex and complicated historical myriad of reverie; Kajahl states ‘My fantasy is gazing back at their fantasy. I am their fantasy and they are mine… I am the specter of their Imagination.
