Eclectica Contemporary at 1-54 London 2024

Ifs and Buts

by Ashraf Jamal

Ayogu Kingsley has stitched together his ‘Icons of the Whitehouse’ series – paintings of Frantz Fanon, Steve Bantu Biko, and other great black leaders – and covered it with sponge. The concealment is telling, as is the remaining flickering apparition. Why? Because, despite the ubiquity of Black Portraiture, it remains a transitory manifestation, a matter of smoke and mirrors, barely legible, barely graspable, despite its dominance in the art market. Kingsley’s point? That the black body, black being, remains chimerical and barely present. Which, perhaps, is why it holds no centre in his new cycle of abstractly figurative works.

Titled ‘If Hives Could Dance’, Kingsley’s vivid new works are subjunctive states, conditional clauses, dreamed possibilities. They make no claim to the centrality of the black body. This renunciation, from an artist who has devoted his art to the grand new revisionist cause, is especially compelling, for now, despite the hype, we cannot shake the uneasy feeling that the centrality of black life remains window dressing, black portraiture little more than a fetish. If this is a staggering truth, it is because it reminds us of the continued depravity of racism and exceptionalism. Further, it also reminds us of the fact, stated by Ralph Ellison in the 1950s, that black life is unseen, disregarded. As Ellison famously writes, ‘I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fibre and liquids – and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me … That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come in contact. A matter of construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality’.

It is this mistaken identity, this refusal to see, that inspires Eclectica’s new optic – ‘Ifs and Buts’ – the trigger for which is a latent uncertainty regarding the matter that is black life, and how, despite its disregard – how black life is seen through the ‘inner eyes’ of others – it nevertheless holds fast to its perilous presence. This is the Nigerian Ayogu Kingsley’s point, the impetus for his fragile abstract expression, as it is that of the artist from Botswana, Thebe Phetogo. If the fragile black body is tenuously present in Kingsley’s artworks, it is absent in Phetogo’s landscapes. For what interests Phetogo is not the fragility of black humankind, but the earth and sky, and its digital graph, that informs being. His acrylics and oils on canvas possess a graphic permanence that strikingly contrasts with Kingsley’s diaphanous abstractions.

As to what this counterpoint tells us? It is about ‘Ifs and Buts’ that signal a distinctive shift from the commodification of the grand black narrative. If the ephemerality of Kingsley’s works in oil sponge and canvas are especially revealing, it is because they paradoxically reveal the miraculous impermanence of black existence, and, as such, its exquisite beauty. Afterall, it does not matter what the inner eyes of others project. This, too, is Phetogo’s point. Both artists seek for a very different set of ‘inner eyes’, a world in which all life is reconciled, all hurt set aside, in which truth, beauty, and grace, are finally sovereign.