A small figure in a kind of spacesuit enters an abstract painting. The surrounding marks need not turn into a planet or a recognisable landscape. Daniel Kojo Schrade's Afronaut can stand among fragments of colour and text, occupying a visual field that seemed, at first, to have no room for a character. The arrival changes the field. A figure who refuses to be assigned a stable place can claim the painting as somewhere to define an image on their own terms.
Schrade began developing the Afronaut motif in 1999. In his artist statement, he describes the figures as displaced characters who create and control their own image spaces. Their headgear can look like a helmet, hat or cap. Their line of ancestry runs through the Ghanaian trickster Anansi and through musicians and makers of Black performance such as Lee “Scratch” Perry, Sun Ra and George Clinton. The figure carries these sources into painting without settling into a single portrait of any of them.
The German-born artist, whose father came from Ghana, works across a long history of paintings, drawings, texts and performance. His Afrofuturist current is explicit in a first-person interview with Contemporary And: he said his practice can be described as retro-futuristic from an Afrofuturist perspective. Yet the work's future is not simply illustrated by a space helmet. It appears when a figure interrupts a painted system, when a familiar word shifts its cultural address, and when abstraction refuses to keep identity in a single frame.
A person who will not stay in the background
The Afronaut enters a picture built from gestural marks, colour and fragments of language. Schrade says his compositions are largely non-representational. Into them he places a figure that can hover between foreground and background. This is a formal decision with consequences for the way the image is read. A portrait usually tells the eye where to settle. A field of abstraction invites it to move among shapes and surfaces. Schrade combines the two so that the viewer must keep changing scale and focus.
The figure is not simply lost. It has a helmet or other head covering, an outfit that suggests deliberate self-fashioning. It may be displaced in the picture, but it is not a helpless object awaiting discovery by the viewer. The artist's own description gives it agency: the Afronaut claims the power to define its image space and renegotiate the names others give it. A spacesuit can then be understood as more than equipment for travel. It is also a boundary between a person and a surrounding atmosphere that may not have been designed for them.
The title Afronaut contains a familiar science-fiction promise, but Schrade refuses to make the surrounding painting a conventional science-fiction scene. There may be no spaceship, horizon or star field to establish a clear destination. The figure's location is the painting itself, among the swirls and interruptions of abstraction. This choice gives the traveller a different task. They do not need to conquer a planet. They need to appear, remain visible and alter the terms of the image that contains them.
Schrade's canvas index records named works such as afronaut I and afronaut II from 2004, afronaut-1L05 from 2005 and afronauts-07C1 from 2007. In afronaut I, a black rounded shape sits low against a rubbed white and pale green field. Two dark strokes rise from it, one nearly vertical and one angled. Another line sweeps in from the left. The head covering could be read as a helmet, yet the figure emerges through a few forceful marks rather than a fully described costume. Green washes and scuffed grey areas surround it without resolving into scenery. The white ground offers space, but the black marks insist on a body in it. Oil, acrylic and charcoal meet on canvas in these works. Repetition gives the figure a career inside painting, a series of different negotiations with fields of mark and colour.
That return is essential. In afronaut II, also dated 2004, an almost white rounded form occupies the lower right, its two narrow points rising into a broad cream shape. Grey and blue spread across the upper edge. Its figure is quieter than the heavy black silhouette of afronaut I, but it still reorganises the surrounding field. The contrast between the canvases lies in pressure as much as palette: one dark form claims space by density, while a pale one becomes visible through its boundary with the colours around it. The repeated motif becomes an experiment in the relation between a person and the visual conditions surrounding them.
Schrade connects the Afronaut to Anansi, the trickster who survives by invention and by changing the terms of an encounter. The relation does not turn the painted figure into a simple illustration of a Ghanaian story. It suggests a method: a traveller can use intelligence, disguise and mobility where a direct claim to power may not work. Sun Ra and Lee Perry bring another lineage of self-made image and sound. Schrade chooses painting to let those histories enter a European canvas tradition without being absorbed by it.
Words that refuse to settle
Language shares the canvas with the figure. Schrade's statement describes text and word fragments as part of his painterly method. Letters appear, recur and change among series. A viewer can begin to read, then lose a word as it breaks into the composition. The surface has a rhythm of recognition and interruption. A term that looks familiar from a distance may require closer attention to become legible.
One recurrent phrase is “Stop Look Listen.” A biographical document hosted by the University of Massachusetts describes the words as a warning on railway crossings in Ghana, his father's country. Their first function is practical: someone crossing tracks needs to pause, look and listen. Schrade took the sequence into painting, where it could become an instruction for another kind of crossing. A viewer approaching an image must also decide when to stop, where to look and what to hear in the fragments before them.
The words can make a crossing into a social place. People delayed at tracks may talk or listen to one another while they wait. In a gallery, the phrase carries that possibility beyond a command to avoid danger. It asks what becomes audible when movement is interrupted. Schrade's pictures are not railway signs and do not offer a lesson with a single correct response. They make a common instruction strange enough to require attention again.
The source of the words also matters. A German artist with a Ghanaian family connection found them in Ghana and brought them into paintings shown in European and American institutions. Their journey could be mistaken for an exotic quotation unless the viewer notices how their meaning changes with context. The phrase is neither a symbol of a whole country nor a secret code known only to the artist. It remains ordinary language with a history of travel. Its placement in an abstract field makes that travel visible.
Schrade's paintings also return to the phrase “Brother Beethoven.” It appears in a series that brings an emblem of European classical music into contact with the political and familial charge of “brother.” In b.beethoven III (2004), large pale letters stretch across a white and rust-red surface. Several saturated red circles interrupt the lettering at different sizes. The eye can pick out parts of a word, then meet a circle where a letter might have carried it onward. Scraped white marks and a dark band beneath the red upper field keep the phrase from reading like a neat caption. The cultural monument enters as broken, painted language that has to be assembled by the viewer.
An image of Beethoven can be treated as the property of a tradition. Schrade's phrase speaks to him instead. “Brother” is intimate, conversational and potentially disruptive when attached to a cultural monument. It changes the distance between an artist of German and Ghanaian heritage and a composer whose image often stands for a supposedly settled European canon. Painting makes that change through text as much as through likeness. It lets a word cross a boundary drawn by habit.
The words and the Afronaut share a method. Each is recognisable but unstable. The figure wears a suit without arriving at a named planet. The warning phrase leaves the railway crossing for a canvas. Beethoven's name enters a different conversation. Schrade makes the in-between into a working surface rather than a biographical condition to be solved. A painting can hold the friction of several contexts at once.
Ghana, Germany and the right to make an image
Schrade was born in Germany and studied painting in Munich and Spain. He has worked in Ghana and has taught in the United States for many years. These routes do not map neatly onto a single national art history. His Afronaut takes that condition as a productive challenge: the figure cannot be placed once and left there. It moves across cultural references while holding onto the power to shape how it appears.
In the Contemporary And interview, Schrade resisted reducing his influences to the United States even while acknowledging the importance of Black American music and art. He named a wider constellation of artists with whom he had learned and worked. Diaspora in his answer is not a line from one origin to one destination. It is a changing field of relation. That understanding helps explain why the Afronauts' visual world is not a coded map back to Ghana or forward to America. It is a space where several forms of knowledge and image can meet without becoming interchangeable.
This also distinguishes the series from a narrow idea of Afrofuturism as space imagery. Schrade's traveller may wear a helmet, but the painter's emphasis is on what happens to a field of abstraction when such a figure arrives. The work asks who has the authority to define a person within a picture. This question reaches beyond the canvas to exhibitions, criticism and art histories that have often separated European abstraction from Black diasporic image-making. Schrade's figure refuses to respect that separation.
The artist's long use of oil, acrylic and charcoal matters in that argument. These are materials of painting rather than futuristic special effects. The speculative force lies in composition, not technological display. A painted figure can intervene in a supposedly neutral field and make its neutrality impossible to sustain. A line of letters can make the eye pause over what it had treated as texture. The canvas becomes a place to test the viewer's habits.
Those materials can behave differently on the same surface. Oil and acrylic can build areas of colour; charcoal can mark a line that feels closer to writing or drawing. Schrade's canvas records use all three in several Afronaut paintings. The artist does not use one medium to assign the figure a fixed identity and another to make the background disappear. Their contact gives the picture several speeds of attention. A viewer may read a word, follow a dark line and then meet a figure emerging from the marks. The sequence resembles the traveller's own unsettled movement through a field that offers neither a clear map nor a single obstacle.
Schrade's Ghanaian and German references do not have to be balanced like two sides of a ledger. His work is more interested in what each source can do when placed in contact with others. Anansi contributes strategies of transformation. Sun Ra offers a model of Black cosmic self-invention. European abstraction contributes a visual language the figure can disrupt. Beethoven's name offers an icon that can be addressed in a new tone. The works bring these materials together because the artist chooses their relation, not because they were destined to form a seamless heritage.
This is a form of authorship that the Afronaut's suit makes visible. A suit is assembled from parts, fitted to a body and worn into an environment. It can protect, signal a role or announce a character. Schrade's figure wears the possibility of a self-made appearance. The painting around it may push, hide or expose it, but it does not have the last word on who the figure is.
The future between forms
The Afronauts' endurance as a series suggests that their question remains open. Schrade has returned to the motif across years and canvases, even as other words and figures entered his practice. Repetition here is not a failure to find a final image. It lets a character test new surroundings. Each painting offers another way for a body to stand among marks and for a viewer to notice how quickly an image becomes legible or strange.
His work asks for a patient kind of looking. One can first see abstraction, then a figure, then a word, then a shift in how all three relate. The image does not deliver a single story of flight or return. Its future is held in those changes of attention. A traveller can enter a picture that seemed to exclude them, make a place within it and leave its rules different for the next viewer.
Schrade's Afronaut never needs to arrive at a finished utopia. Their achievement is to claim a space in which self-definition remains possible. The helmet, the fractured words and the painted field keep identity in motion without making it empty. From a crossing sign in Ghana to a German canvas and a gallery elsewhere, the work sends a simple sequence back to the person looking: stop, look, listen. The figure is already inside the painting. The question is what the viewer will allow that presence to change.