Total commitment to the art of mark-making.

Toyin Ojih Odutola just had her fourth solo show at Jack Shainman Gallery. Odutola’s medium of choice is drawing. She is quite aware of the inherent challenge to restricting her practice to drawing, which has always been considered in Western art as secondary to painting. Yet she embraces the medium with the same ambition, scale and vision that one would associate with painting and feels quite gratified that despite this prejudice her work is getting full recognition.

In this particular body of work she has eschewed color and limited her palette mostly to black and white. I remembered the vibrant colors of her previous show at Shainman and was at first taken aback. Yet quickly I became fascinated with her obsessive mark making and the patterns it creates. These patterns activate the surface of the skin, which loses its particularities and shifts from being something identifiable to something unstable. At times it is hard to say where one figure starts and the other ends. Odutola’s subject is portraiture and yet she says little about the identity of the people she chooses to portray. Identity is subsumed under the structured patterning. We don’t know if the skin is white or black. In this body of work she moves deliberately away from politics of identity – ie her Nigerian identity – and the prescribed idea of portraiture to focus on perception and art making.

Toyin Odutola’s latest work showing at Jack Shainman is exactly that. Toyin specializes in drawings and portraiture but her ink-layering process is very unique. In the past she worked almost exclusively with ballpoint (pen and ink) and focused mostly on the skin of her subjects creating a colorful shimmering effect.The figure was usually set against a white or black ground.

Toyin’s drawing technique with a ball point is a painstaking one and in a moment of frustration with the demands of this technique she decided to explore charcoal and pastel, which are looser mediums and allow for more freedom and broader range of movement.

In this new show the background has come alive. She has turned to a dense layering of pastels and charcoals and positioned her subjects – her two brothers – amidst rich textiles creating a dialogue between figure and ground.

While the subject matter is figurative, it was the sense of abstraction that caught my attention. She is still focusing on the skin of her subjects but now the patterns of mark making which map the skin geography become more abstract against the abstract motifs of the textile. She indicates to me that she sees the motifs on the textile as language and the marks depicting the skin as another language. One could say that the skin and fabric are engaged in a dialogue.

While traditionally the artist is meant to highlight the figure over the background here Toyin resists that impulse. Some of the figures actually feel like they are floating and don’t seem to be resting against the backdrop which enhances this sense of abstraction. My eyes shift continuously between background and foreground and have a hard time settling on either one; they are both so powerful. While Toyin moved to the US at a young age she embraces her African heritage. The pattern of the backgrounds can be found in the mud cloth of the Bamana weavers made in Mali. Set against the patterns of the cloth the marksof the skin remind me of scarification that one can see at times within certain tribes.

Toyin speaks of her wish to portray her brothers not having to adjust to any environment. She depicts them relaxed and just being themselves. Through formal means, by juxtaposing background and figure in a way that dispels any impression of spatial interaction she effectively conveys the sense that these boys exists independently from their context.

However, this is not the life experienced by either Toyin or her brothers who had to move from Ife, Nigeria to Alabama and had to adjust repeatedly to new situations. She is not choosing to reflect a reality, but more a longing/ fantasy. Perhaps in the process of doing this there is a measure of empowerment that takes place for the artist or even repair who in the process of art making is able to correct a painful history. In other words: Draw her loved ones in a way she would have wanted them to feel.

Toyin in her work challenges preconceived ideas and asks us to reconsider “our perceptions of others and imagine something different.” She speaks of her desire to discourage the viewer from objectifying the black body. “ I ‘m working on some pieces right now of my brothers in nude poses, and they’re not meant to be a spectacle. I ‘m trying to get the viewer to look at people being people. The only way to do that is to work the skin so much that it’s no longer just a flat surface for someone to wash over their ideas – they have to look and dig to find a person.” (Excerpt from an interview of the artist by Justin Allen)

More than anything, this series is an act of love, a reminder of its presence even when all else changes