A Room with All Our Things, an ongoing joint exhibition featuring five upcoming male and female artists offers aesthetics and critical engagement to art lovers.
WE’ll keep searching for young and upcoming artists, the ones that have their heads on their shoulders. The ones that know what they’re doing and all they require is a platform to be exposed. We’ll do our best in managing them,” the art manager and director of The Art Pantheon Gallery, Nana Sonoiki had promised in an interview in early November.
A month after, she’s fulfilling her promise with ‘A Room With All Our Things’, a group exhibition of works by upcoming and vibrant artists including Toju Clarke, Abisola Gbadamosi, Tolulope Daramola, Paul Ayihawu and Samuel Vittu.
The show, which opened on December 12 and ends on Boxing Day, is Art Pantheon’s last for 2021 and showcases an exciting mix of paintings, which affirms Sonoiki’s observation in her curatorial note that it “makes apparent what a shared space of mutual recognition and consolation can be, probing into the possibilities such a space can unlock.”
Their exciting voices, she notes further, “are different, their styles unique, but in A Room with All Our Things, these five artists have fashioned a common space for us all, a room of their things, and ours.”
It’s indeed a room for everyone with the artists reflecting on different socio-cultural, political and religious issues with the showcased works.
Ayihawu, who visited ‘Escapism’, Art Pantheon’s last joint show in November got on the ongoing exhibition serendipitously. He reached out to Sonoiki on Instagram and convinced by the quality of his works, she invited him to be part. His four paintings, ‘Tulips & Roses’, ‘Day Dreaming’, ‘Eyin Ju’ and ‘Borno’s Bloom’ look at the impact of colonialism on African cultures and values. He expresses this with flipped portraits of black people dressed in a hybrid of western and African dresses.
‘Tulips & Roses’, for instance, shows two ladies sitting on a bench and holding roses but both their eyes are covered by purple head ties (gele). Besides, one of them is holding a mirror she appears to be looking into. Why would someone whose sight is hindered by a gele still be looking into a mirror? The artist explained that the gele on the western dress was deliberately incongruous. “The cap and the gele are vernacular to the dress, they are not supposed to go together and I’m using that to talk about contemporary issues like loneliness, companionship and self-evaluation.”
Purple is present in all of Ayihawu’s works and explaining his preference for the colour, he said, “I believe purple stands for royalty. It stands for purity as well so I want that touch in my work.”
Using sgraffito (a scratching technique), Clark’s works depict the attitudes and state of mind of his subjects. Using muted tones of brown, gold and lack, he highlights the emotions of his subjects in works including ‘The Missing Piece’, ‘Watchers’, ‘Bipolar’, ‘Perspective I’ and ‘Perspective II’. In ‘The Missing Piece’, the YABATECH graduate plays on different perspectives on his female subject’s face. But his ‘Bipolar’ is striking, affirming his interest in mental health advocacy. “A lot of people don’t take their mental health seriously and bipolar is one of those illnesses Nigerians don’t think they have until they are diagnosed. This is to draw attention to the issue”.
Vittu, favouring anthropomorphism for all his works, ‘This Side of Heaven’, ‘A Gentleman’s Rose’, ‘The Damage of Pain’ and ‘Not Holier Thou’, explores earthly and celestial themes. His preference for anthropomorphism, he said is because “animals have the same traits as human beings and, in most cases, when you look at it carefully, animals are more organized than humans. It’s a trait that you get to admire from a distance so I decided to explore their ways of life.”
He added that the inclusion of roses in all the works is because “most animals, especially domestic ones crave love from us human beings and the sign of love is a flower. You get to express yourself to the ones you love by sometimes buying flowers, so it’s a deliberate effort to infuse love into my message.”
‘Not Holier Than Thou’, showing a monkey-faced priest in a cassock with cherubs gripping the edges of his garment, preaches spirituality over religion, with spirituality cleverly inscribed on it in Arabic and Hebrew. “The idea is for us to live in love over religion, and then have a personal relationship with God rather than going through intermediaries.”
Daramola’s realistic portraits employ dark-toned colours to evoke the moodier sides of the human psyche. The subjects of his paintings are often sombre, contemplative. Their eyes, skin tones, and aspects evince an air of melancholy. We see all these in ‘Family Tree’, ‘In Her Own Crown’, and ‘Gentle Reminder’.
Narrative expressionist and nature lover, Gbadamosi shows beautiful watercolours containing bits of herself because the works were excerpted from her journal. These include ‘Aurora’, ‘Who are you when no one’s watching, ‘We are One’, ‘True Colours’ and ‘Can You Hear Me.’ Gbadamosi’s journey into visual art started with henna making and it’s not a surprise that several of her watercolours in the show are warm and luscious. ‘Aurora’, which the artist who first showed at the Brick Lane Gallery, London in 2016, is an example.
Having hosted three shows earlier in the year, Sonoiki’s Art Pantheon couldn’t have chosen a better way to close the year. ‘A Room with All Our Things’ has something for everyone.