Beauty and the Beholder
Mittwoch, 23. Februar 2022 - 18:00 Uhr
AG18 – Urban Art Gallery
The question of whether the discipline of aesthetics is a science or an art is both an ontological and an epistemological query. The saying goes that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”; this is as true for a relative of the arts such as architecture as it is for the visual, literary, and performing arts. And it is because this dictum remains an eternal verity that the intersection of ontology — the study of what exists — and epistemology — the study of how to validate what we claim to know of what exists is so critical in aesthetics. What befuddles the mind is how Western canons of beauty dominate and colonize the collective consciousness of standards of beauty for the entire planet. Asians, Africans, First Nation peoples and indigenous people all over the world have been propagandized into accepting the position of the subaltern with regard to aesthetics and notions of personal beauty. Perhaps this is a reason for the exclusion of Black portraiture, up till recent times, from the canons of contemporary visual culture and art. The idea that positivism guided by symmetry should guide the idea around beauty is in keeping with Cartesian logic but this notion is not necessarily applicable to others not ruled by right angles. Symmetry may induce universal delight, order, and rationality but the same whilst applied to beauty may induce tedium, boredom and ennui. This begs the question: is it possible for us to see something in a piece of art that is not already present within ourselves? How do we shift perceptions without replacing one worn-out cliché with another? The Black is the beautiful movement championed in the late Sixties and Seventies was an essential counter-conduct reactionary movement suited to its time but in the Twenty-First Century, artists are looking to create their own more radical sometimes more subtle reflections for our time.
Damilola Opedun’s hyper-realistic rendition, in which the black bodies
depicted embody Western fashion has perforative essence. Once we allow our eyes to stray beyond the familiar we see that juxtaposition rather than the opposition is the basis of the synthesis established by Opedun.
Johnson Ocheja, oscillates between the real, projected, and imagined. The compression of all these textures of perception opens the gate to the modern surreal. That is, a surreal grounded enough, in reality, to be rigid in symmetry, but textured in dreamlike pastel with skin glistening from blue so black it could be obsidian. Again, the juxtaposition between the real and the imagined is managed here in terms of complementary binaries.
Akinsola Yusuf, whose works oscillate between complex states, timelines, real and imagined states. He carves room for the imaginary to exist. The absence of full facial representations on the glistening black skin tones he depicts, his use of various media, and the dexterity with which he deploys discordant colors all pull on the mimetic string of the self — a self-revealed as uncoordinated and asymmetrical.
All three artists build on their subjects, adding ethereal elements to their
paintings. There is nevertheless also revealed an elegance juxtaposed against the still symmetrical frame a camera would have captured. The idea of beauty and self subjection is challenged, and the exploration of individual visions of beauty in the ontological sense is a common thread. Through the depiction of freshly colonized ancestors, anxious contemporary youth, or the asymmetric passport of self, these works explore not just identity, but how it functions through layers of reality, from the physical to the psychological and spiritual. Beauty does not have to be superficial, it cuts much deeper than the skin.
In cooperation with @AfricanArtists' Foundation.
Curated by Azu Nwagbogu.
