His statement continued:
“Asmara is a beautiful city at eight thousand feet above sea-level, planned and designed by Italian colonialists at the turn of the century. In addition to the collision of architectures, iconographies, and propaganda art there was the unique, and palpable visual aesthetic of death: Soviet tanks rumbled through the streets, fighter planes strafed the skies, and deadly uniformed soldiers rummaged through the streets. It was a medieval vision of hell incarnate. Government-sponsored death squads had ‘powers of emergency’ over any Eritrean citizen. I suspect I have carried this angst and fear of imminent explosion within me to this day, for when I paint I am accompanied by dissonances, syncopations, and the ultimate will for life and moral order of goodness.”
New York was a huge influence on him, as with so many artists before and after. Joseph Stapleton at the Art Students League was a connection to both Abstract Expressionism and the social realist history so prevalent at the League. He also worked for a time at the Cinque Gallery, where, if he were not before, he would have become familiar with Hale Woodruff’s work and the great tradition of Woodruff’s peers such as Charles Alston and Romare Bearden.
Beginning in 1996, Ficre’s work underwent a profound transition of palette and aim, into a period of brilliant abstraction that is concomitant with his work developing and inventing recipes and ambiance at Caffé Adulis. He described the cultural influence of Eritrea on his aesthetics: “A trip to the market guaranteed a dazzling range of traditional crafts repeated from one generation to the next without ongoing critical intervention and independent of religious function. The caves near my mother’s village are full of prehistoric rock drawings and paintings. My eyes took in all of this; my painting allowed me finally to process the seemingly dissonant visual information.”
He was an artist always, but what that meant in terms of making a life as an artist was still developing. “The painter as an individual, however, without church or mosque affiliation, and sanctioned by civilians and government is a relatively new concept for us in Eritrea, forty years old at most. When I paint in my studio in New Haven, some five thousand miles away from home, I still find myself reacting to this reality. My normative experience is inescapably Eritrean. And as it turned out for me, I also have to respond and account for the stimuli and influencing forces that I find myself open or vulnerable to, because of my life here. So far I have been able to cull the various forces such as Be-Bop, Modern Jazz (especially Thelonious Monk and Charles Mingus), polyrhythms of the African diaspora, and the great many paintings that I spend time viewing in museums, when I can take time off. I am continually recontextualizing my normative experiences in early Eritrea, and one of those manifestations has been my work as a chef, where I have found myself integrating cross-cultures into dishes. I have become a conscious synchretizer. My cooking is how I make my living, but I have also been able to make a creative experience that in fact complements my painting philosophy.”
In his work is also the influence of maps, topography, the African and European study of geography, and the African awareness of changing maps and externally-imposed borders that cause so much suffering and chaos.