Category: Life – The Midweek Magazine

The problems plaguing the country topped the paintings and drawings by Duke Asidere at his  solo art exhibition, Mental Space, which kicked on July 4 at the Wheatbaker Hotel, Ikoyi, Lagos.

The exhibition, which ends on September 15, is Asidere’s first solo show at the Wheatbaker; it is sponsored by Wheatbaker and Louis Guntrum Wines. The exhibition curator is Sandra Mbanefo Obiago.

The works feature 38 paintings on paper and canvas, mirroring the many dilemmas in Nigeria. From inadequate power supply to bad governance, impunity, insecurity, senseless looting of national treasury, ethnicity and religious intolerance, among others, Asidere uses his paintings and drawings as platforms for the interrogations of these challenges. The exhibits are in four compartments: Power series, sketches, faces and signature form.

Asidere uses human figure as his central object and subject, be it sketchy drawing or painting. Though his drawing and painting complement each other, the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria trained artist believes that ‘’art is a mirror of life, reflecting the eras we go through and the influence they impart on us. It is not tied to mediums, but a mental and emotional space that insulates us from all that’s around’’.

He said artists should enjoy their art and create for intrinsic reasons, not on demand. “Art is not only for the present. It is a documentation of the present, projects the future, and outlives the artist. Each artist must work in these three spaces – the present, the future and then leave a legacy. It is not about the quantity produced, but the quality and drive,” he said during a preview session of his works in Lagos.

Thematically, Asidere uses Mental Space to interrogate some of the old stereotypes and mindset that often stole the fire of disunity while drawing attention to critical challenges people go through to survive in Nigeria. One of such is One man, One generator, a painting on electricity supply, which has hit an all time low in many decades. Power and Darkness is another painting that dwells on the implications of inadequate power supply on the people.

Unlike Victims of information, which is a busy work of acrylic, pen, and pastel on canvas, Power and Darkness is a broad painting of an entire canvas in dark colour with few dotted white and red spots to illustrate the ratio of darkness and light in today’s Nigeria.

With minimal illustrations, Asidere also relives his mental memories of his ever-growing neighbourhood of Orelope, a suburb in Alimosho Local Government Area of Lagos State in Discovering Orelope Street.

The work, though shows little visuals, is a product of the artist’s mental negotiations of what to reflect on canvas about the transformation of the street. Hence, he uses faces (of dialoguing entrepreneurs who are mainly women) turned to different directions of the canvas as only visuals on the plain yellow piece.

Other exhibits on display are Story Time, Simple Dreams, Looking Ahead, Headless Figures, Distortion facts and Historical Lies and The Day Off.

No doubt, Asidere is among Nigeria’s most talented contemporary artists. For over 25 years, he has commented on Nigeria’s socio-political landscape through various genre, including pencil, engravings, oil and acrylic, pastels, and collage. His practice all these years speak to artistic boldness and confidence. To many of his admirers and followers, the former art teacher at Auchi Polytechnic, Edo State is as restless as his sketches and drawings, which he does effortlessly at any given spare time.

On the state of the nation, Asidere said in as much as ‘’we crave for a better world, everyone needs sanity and peace in the society for growth. Unfortunately, the government never had the political will to deal with corruption because anyone who steals a handset is sent to jail while treasury looters go to court in entourage of security guards and sympathisers who wear Aso ebi (uniformed dress).

According to the curator of the exhibition, Sandra, Asidere’s drawing of the market woman selling tomatoes with dollar price doodles scribbled in the shadows is a wry commentary on Nigeria’s runaway exchange rates and galloping inflation apparently asphyxiating even the sale of locally grown produce.

“Duke looks at painting from the lens similar to that of many older masters. This is the lens of simplicity – the lens of sincerity,” wrote the famous artist, Gani Odutokun (1946-1995) who mentored Asidere while teaching at Ahmadu Bello University.

“Duke possesses the kind of sincerity that has brought enormous recognition to artists, such as abstract expressionists – Philip Guston & De Kooning. These are artists who feel the urge to say something and will not like to be inhibited no matter how unpalatable to the society, what they might have to say. They will not create even a square centimeter of a picture just to please. But paint they will, to express an inner urgency. Duke belongs to this fold.”

Sandra explains that Mental Space is Asidere’s external response to an internal, multi-layered landscape of deep thought, questions, and critique.

“Through his drawings, he challenges us to reflect on a constantly changing political context, in which he highlights the crazy and controversial excesses in our lives with bold, often humorous poignancy,” she adds.

Tony Akudinobi is a versatile sculptor who understands the hidden-creative potential of his primary medium, wood. He carves wood with the imaginative impulse of a weaverbird. As a cultural archivist and (a cultural) entrepreneur, he has explored the vast resources of his cultural homeland for his art. He has done so through his cultivated mastery of proverbs and oral narratives, art lore as an incarnation of that cultural wisdom that invests art with its seamless imageries.

Most of his sculptural themes are driven from Igbo oral lore. From them, he has defined the cultural spaces and meanings for his sculptures. He has immense love and empathy for the Nigerian culture, particularly, his Igbo culture. They provide him with the creative and cultural platform for the creative berthing of his inventive sculptures. He uses cultural norms and practices as a template for his creative exploration into modernity. In his sculptures, modernity engages tradition in a creative dialogue. These have led to new discoveries and transformations in his sculptural production. His sculptures are diverse and are a product of new explorative technologies.

Like Chinua Achebe, he believes that a man must know where the rain began to beat him, while at the same time, embracing the creative resources of modernity. This is reflected in his industrially based carving tools. He explores their potentials in engaging and transforming several levels of cultural, social and economic connectivities into works of art. He is a master of his creative spaces: local, national and global. His sculptures may be produced at the local site of his creative industry, but he knows quite fully well that they are potent as signal of self-empowerment and cultural entrepreneurship. For him, art is a tool in the search economic nationalism. In a condition of economic uncertainty, which is driven by the urgency of economic diversification, his art provides an ample fodder from which to beat back the shadows of economic downturn. In this setting, the resources of his art can be harnessed as one of the most variable options in the reinvention of a national economy. My advocacy is that the art industry provides a highly productive terrain.

The government ought to harness this because works of art represents hidden economic treasures, already fully exploited by the West, particularly the United States of America, as they steer the world in the ship of late capitalism, while constructing the other.

Obi’s art provides an economic counter narrative to the west and the potential of art in income generation especially at a fertile level of artistic production.

His sculptures are good indicators of the interface between cultural production and the politics of economic revival and regeneration. He has a range of sculptures that simulate traditional chairs and tables with a keen eye for their surface effects, technical management and the strategic use of indigenous patterns. His mastery of indigenous sculpture iconography is shown in his visually engaging sculptures, original and eventful. The aesthetic merits of his sculptures define a commanding presence in any global setting such as art fairs, economic and cultural exchanges, and even, in international trade fairs. His works represent a creative domestication of our cultural treasures in a modern economic environment. They are products of creative mastery. Their visual idioms speak across cultural boundaries. This is why they can serve as economic bridges because they rise from a local cultural/national site and across global art boundaries. They engage the world with the stridency of their visual qualities

The sculptor has created a body of works that are enticing and delightful, from his mixed media furniture’s to a variety of stools, thrones and other abstract works that celebrate art as an aesthetic event. Their surfaces explore textile art, found objects; combine carving with stitching in the mixed media orientation. His understanding of the metal medium lies in his manipulation of positive and negative spaces, especially his linearism. These are quite enchanting. He celebrates functions in his works yet he transcends them to ignite the aesthetic. These are innovative statements from his cultural site. For him art can serve the ways of functions but soon transcended them. The works can at best be described as creative invocations to culture, their source of origin and from which they define their autonomous aesthetic spaces and through which the sculptor challenges us with works of art par excellence. They can easily find new homes as part of collections in western galleries and museums, even while the elites can purchase them as symbols of cultural interchange in a globalised world. His works betray a sculptor’s intellectual and creative insights in his media versatility, good technical handling and his gift of sculptural forms that define the changing boundaries of modernity only to interconnect the postmodern aesthetics of art and its sematic possibilities and variations. He tells us about the richness of our cultural homeland and the potentials that they offer for reconnecting the modern world. The triumph of his works lies in his creative harnessing of the epigrammatic qualities of proverbs, myths and other oral resources. In this sense, his works constitute visual/verbal metaphors of the past, present and future. They emerge in the fullness of their visual cadence, aesthetic merits and with an elusive beauty as if they are sculptural bodies with enthralling ornaments. They are at once poetic imageries driven by a mythic imagination in search of cognate metaphors of culture, change as they engage modernity as a kindred spirit.

Some sampling of his works

One of his works, ‘OSINIME’, is a stylised carved seat clothed with striated abstract patterns; a proximate simulation of Igbo carved doors and title stools. Forcefully abstract, it is sturdy without losing the sculptural energy that gives it aesthetic life. In its visual coding, the sculptor writes,

“Still each ocean flows into the vastness of all life.

At the end tattered boats and paddles

float away after serving their purposes.

The drama plays on for the

flowers on the shores

for each must set sail at dawn

For him, a sculpture piece, static and immobile, delights with its alluring beauty. What is static is simultaneously in aesthetic motion, as motion begets motion. Borne on the stream of these motions, we crisscross both old and new boundaries of meanings. A solid object, a piece of sculpture is dematerialised and yields hidden secrets of the human condition, nay experience.

In another sculpture, UKO OKANGA (The Coven), the sculptor again in tones,

“From Nostradamus to the

cave of the ancients

…what to be may

have since become in

the wombs of time.

From the sculptor’s wombs of time, he has produced five deftly carved thrones in wood, with anthropomorphic hints as to their forms and ornate surfaces, including others that vary in their qualities of organism. They face a central table on top of which is a fan. The thrones have become icons themselves since they no longer symbolise. They have become that which they already symbolised. As symbols, they have incarnated into visual icons, as spiritual avatars on the side of eternal shadows. As material objects, they have transformed their external identities into spiritual bodies. In this way, sculptor has shown his capacity for transforming material objects into extra-spiritual phenomena; given a voice that speaks of the nether world where reality is a narrative beyond immediate knowledge, the mystery of the eternal present, and of art as a metaphor, a tool of myth making and recovery even within the shadows of a cosmos that defines as it erases. The work, OTAGBURUAGU, is an abstract furniture draped with the music of fabric surfaces and exudes a self confidence that easiest earns it unique status in any regal space. Symmetric and asymmetric designs are strategically deployed to achieve a compelling aesthetic statement. The furniture is ultimately a mixed media presentation that is rare in modern furniture art. For him, producing furniture is like music making. The production constituents of solid wood, pure cow hide leather (seat) and hand-woven akwete cloths may pose their technical problems. The sculptor, however, knows how to constitute them into a new creative partnership. This house furniture shares various editions and varies in their aesthetic energy. In deploying a variety of materials, whether woven cloths, raffia, modern fabrics, etc., the sculptor elevates his stools, chairs, furniture and other works to a high level of creative inventiveness in their material/production base. His abstract stools are innovative openwork abstractions in wood. They are no longer seats. But works of art in their aesthetic sufficiency, especially in the blending of form, space and textures. They define shifting boundaries of form within cultural frames and historical time. His sculptures interrogate our unstable and ever-shifting locations in the Nigerian project while providing us with a clear anchor in the stability of art, its capacity to induce a futuristic version in our national life.

The time is now right to support a large scale production of his works on a national support base. Our art cultural industries should provide a platform for new dimensions of economic diversification in a mono-economic environment. I endorse the sculptor’s creative versatility. I endorse his sculptural idioms. I endorse their aesthetic merits as well as their self-sufficient integrity. These works are collectables in any global art markets.

Prof. Aniakor is of the  Cross River University of Technology, Calabar.

Art is better appreciated when there is a basic understanding of what inspired the forms. Content of art is, therefore, a major criterion in art appreciation. It is important to briefly analyse the context of jegede’s themes. The first is rooted in severe personal loss and stoic self-recovery while the other is on the traumatic after-effects of Boko Haram attacks with paradoxical comical contemplations.

Visualising Memory

It was Ali Mazrui, the erudite professor that quoted William Wordsmith’s definition of poetry as “powerful emotions recollected in tranquility.” Mazrui was justifying his first short novel titled: The Trial of Christopher Okigbo, which he wrote in 1971 after the untimely death of  Okigbo in 1967 during the Biafran war. Jegede’s anguish was intense even if disguised behind his sagacious gaze when on December 23, 2011, he lost his beloved son Ayo. He bore the grief with stoical equanimity. The devastating loss, however, left a gaping vacuum in his heart, which he continually fills with visual and poetic metaphors.

It is, therefore, instructive that a few years thereafter, jegede’s emotions were sufficiently conditioned to ruminate over personal and national losses thereby culminating in the production of robust visual illusions and realities that further define him as a master aesthete.

While explaining the concept behind the Celestial Aesthetics series, jegede noted that the paintings represent his fascination with terminality and infinity. They were to draw attention to what he described as “cosmic vastness”. This is a conscious and subconscious reaction not only to the physical realities of the universe, but also to the ecstatic rhetoric behind life and death. Beyond the incomprehensible depth of the earth’s geological diversity, there is the infinite vastness of the Solar System where global secrets lurk.

Religion has paved fluid pathways in the arid desert of human imagination, and human contemplations have adduced spiritual presence to the shrouded essence of the universe. With binocular vision, it is possible to perceive metaphysical entities. It is even assumed that the abode of all departed saintly souls is in heaven—a blissful haven located in spatial infinitum. Having contemplated on the origin and the magnificence of the universe, jegede’s artistic mind therefore indulged in the visuo-spatial poetics of cosmic realities.

Celestial Aesthetics

The Celestial Aesthetic Series shares affinities with the paintings exhibited in his 2011 Peregrinations solo exhibition in Lagos, in which he explored issues relating to environmental pollution in the Niger Delta region as a result of crude oil spillage. He also examined the resultant armed militancy of the Ijaw Youths who protested the lackadaisical attitude of the Nigerian government towards environmental safety.

In Peregrinations, Jegede matched visual forms with thematic relevance by employing stylistic and content correlation. In depicting the oil spillage and the pollution that devastated the Niger Delta land and rivers, jegede used marbling effect to create liquidised features. He used colourdrips to run over the canvases thereby generating pictorial fluidity. He tamed out recognisable forms that defined his chosen themes. This sub-style is equally present in the exhibition and can be seen in the Boko Haram series.

However, the works in the Celestial Aesthetics series have less defined images because the central preoccupation of jegede was to depict the “inexhaustibility and prowess of cosmic vastness”. It is also instructive that while the paintings in Peregrinations exposed earthly problems, the celestial series celebrates the eternal glory of the Milky Way and its galaxies. Employing a masterly manipulation of the marbling technique, he turned the colour-splash accidents to deliberate designs by conditioning the marbling to generate volume and void schematic splashes into discernable images.

He appropriated the ambivalent volume and void effect of the color splashes into deliberate visual illusions that depict infinite depth of the heavens. jegede used the Celestial Aesthetics series to elevate human imagination from mundane realities into the esoteric realm of celestial escapism. He lured our mental sensibilities to appreciate prophetic possibilities of life thereafter by conjuring colors with varying degrees of intensity and value. In Celestial Aesthetics Series 1, the dark night skyline became effervescent with sparkling dots of brilliant tones. Speckles of tinted hues illuminate the depth of the heavens and thus animated the spatial constellation.

Celestial Aesthetics Series 1 is, particularly interesting, because it allows associated cultural imaging of jegede’s creative mind. He seems to have extrapolated the chromatic taxonomy of the Yoruba and appropriated the emotive relevance of color symbolism. In Yoruba palette consciousness, all colours are classified into three generic groups namely dudu (darkish), pupa (reddish) and funfun (whitish). This chromatic connotation accommodates all cool and warm hues including the achromatic black and white colours. jegede used his knowledge of Yoruba visual and verbal poetics to explore colour symbolism in Celestial Aesthetics Series 2. He applied blue, red and white which are major colours in the chromatic lexicon of the Yoruba to articulate and contextualise the thematic relevance of the painting.

It is, therefore, plausible to associate the emotive content of the painting with a popular Yoruba dirge often chanted by the bereaved while lamenting the loss of a beloved. The chant rendered in Yoruba can be translated to English thus:

“He who knows the blue touraco

Mourn the death of Indigo

He who knows the red wood cock

Lament the demise of cam-wood pigment

He who knows the cattle egret

Empathise with the transition of white chalk.”

The above Yoruba dirge conceptualises grief in colours by personifying some beautiful birds with comely plumages as visual metaphor for cherished personalities. It was perhaps the above dolor that prompted the use of blue, red and white colours in Celestial Aesthetics Series 1. The series of paintings were done by jegede in memory of Ayo, his beloved son whose sparkling sun set so suddenly.