Je’ni isi isi, translated from Igbo as “go to the beginning”, is both an invocation and an artistic excavation. It is not merely a return to origins, but a deliberate act of re-entering the mythic, imaginative space from which the artist’s visual language first emerged. The works in Ebuka Agudiegwu’s exhibition move fluidly between personal memory and collective myth. They draw on the cosmologies of Igbo folklore, where humans, animals, plants, and celestial beings coexisted in a shared, animated world. Under the ritual glow of moonlight, elders recited these tales by moonlight, narratives that did not simply entertain but encoded moral, environmental, and metaphysical knowledge. These early encounters with oral tradition shaped the artist’s capacity for visual allegory, a skill now embedded in his painterly vocabulary.

Equally formative were biblical narratives, first apprehended by the artist as a child through the same lens as folklore Elijah ascending in a chariot of fire, Samson confronting the lion, Moses’ staff transfigured into a serpent. In their reimagining here, these stories are stripped of dogmatic framing and allowed to resonate as archetypes, part of a universal mythic canon that spans from the Book of Genesis to the epic cycles of world art.

The central motif, Yearning for Eden, recalls the persistent art historical longing for paradise, a theme that spans from Jan Brueghel’s verdant depictions of the Garden to Gauguin’s primitivist visions of Tahiti, where Eden becomes both a geographic fantasy and an allegory for innocence lost. For the artist, Eden is not a fixed place but a temporal condition: the unselfconsciousness of childhood, before the awakening to shame, morality, and mortality. This reframing aligns with the 20th-century modernist preoccupation with “the return”, Picasso’s engagement with so-called “primitive” forms, or Chagall’s dreamscapes that collapse memory and myth.

In works such as A Match Made in Heaven, the visual drama invokes the celestial battle between Archangel Michael and Lucifer, but its true terrain is psychological. The painting situates itself in the tradition of spiritual conflict in Western art seen in Guido Reni’s Archangel Michael or Rubens’ Fall of the Rebel Angels, yet here the opposition is internal, a struggle with the self, with doubt, and with the unseen forces that shape human will.

Across the exhibition, clouds shift into bestial or divine forms, foliage becomes a narrative device, and figures seem suspended between worlds. These are not illustrations of stories but visual theologies—paintings that operate as sites of remembrance and reinvention. Je’ni isi isi positions itself within a continuum of artists who turn to myth not as escapism, but as a critical apparatus for understanding human experience, from William Blake’s illuminated manuscripts to Wangechi Mutu’s hybrid deities. In this return to the beginning, Ebuka is not seeking the past as it was, but testing the possibility of paradise within the present moment an act of resistance against the inevitability of loss.