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

I love this photograph of Malick Sedibe!

Shortly after my return from Kenya I went to Houston for the opening of the exhibition Progress of Love at the Menil Collection. I had co-sponsored one of the video of the artist Zina Saro-Wiva on Kissing!

Several months before that I had met Zina at a party and we had subsequently gotten together to talk about her work and the positive focus of my blog on Africa.  A former BBC journalist, the founding filmmaker of the alt Nollywood movement Zina is originally from Nigeria but was raised in the UK. She aims in her work to change the way the world sees Africa.  It was quickly evident that we were both on the same page.

Zina explores in her work highly personal experiences. She showed me her recent video project, which focused on the subject of mourning.  She referred discreetly to her personal family tragedy – her father, Ken Saro –Wiwa, an environmental and human rights activist had been executed by hanging in 1995 in Nigeria. She had found it impossible to properly mourn her father in England. Local mourning traditions seemed so unsatisfactory. She had been in search for “ritual and meaning ever since.” It had been so difficult to let herself express her grief. One part of the video shows her with her hair shorn, grieving, and eventually fully weeping.

There was no question I felt uncomfortable witnessing such raw emotion and was keenly aware of it. However it was also coupled with compassion and a desire to join in.  I also could not help but think about how I relate to my own grief – we all have some. All of my reactions were evidence that Zina’s work was powerful, provocative, and emotionally demanding of the viewer. I liked that: I was struck by her courage and the cathartic and healing aspect of the performance.

There is no mourning without love. The video she had shown me was to be shown at the Pulitzer Foundation in St Louis and was to be a part of a three prong collaborative project on the theme of Love and its many forms in Africa and beyond. Zina was in the early stages of making a video about Africans kissing, Eaten By The Heart to be included in the exhibition at the Menil Collection in Houston, one of the venues. The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts was the second venue and included works by Sophie Calle and Yinka Shonibare.  The third venue was the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos, Nigeria and was to focus on the more performative aspect of Love.

Zina described her thinking to me: “ So many of us cite with confidence that Love is universal. But the performance of love is, it seems, cultural. I wonder how the impact of how we choreograph and culturally organize the performance of love impacts what we feel inside and who we become.”

Needless to say, I was on board.

If I felt uncomfortable watching Zina grieve, let me tell you I was very uncomfortable with 12 couples kissing for 3 minutes each. Zina’s starting point was the fact that Africans generally don’t kiss in public and not even that much in private . Things are changing for the young generation more exposed to Western pop culture through the media.She has made use of vibrant colors, various background sound tracks and a careful selection of couples, some gay, some straight, some expressive, some less so, some married, some strangers to reflect the reality of life and love and draw the viewer in. She complemented the video with interviews that can be seen on the website recounting Africans’ thinking about kissing. I recommend checking it out.

The exhibition at the Menil Collection was curated by Kristina Van Dyke, an African Art specialist in charge of revitalizing and expanding the role of African Art in the Menil Collection. The exhibition was at once provocative, thoughtful, scholarly, carefully edited and often visually beautiful and conceptually stimulating.  It presented contemporary African artists’ reflections and explorations on changing modes and meanings of love in today’s global society.

I was totally captivated by Romuald Hazoumé’s installation ONG SBOP situated at the beginning of the exhibition. Hazoumé documents a project he started on Valentine day 2011 in Benin. A non-governmental organization or NGO it is staffed by Beninois and has the mission to help Westerners live better lives. Included in the installation are videos of people, some of them celebrities like the world renown Angelique Kijo, going through markets asking for money for the poor in the West and reminding the Beninois that they should help because they know about love which is something Westerners do not know about. As I am involved with an English NGO that does work in Kenya, this particularly captivated me.  While Hazoumé’s NGO turns upside down the normal paradigm of aid giving and points to one of its shortfalls, it is above all to be understood as an act of self respect for the people of Benin.

Across the way was Felix Gonzales-Torres, Untitled (Perfect Lovers), 1991, a perfect introduction to the personal side of love and its limitations: Two battery-operated clocks set at the same time at the beginning of the exhibition, slowly fall out of sync. It is a reference to love and loss at the time of AIDS.

Yinka Shonibare’s In the Swing installation anchored the exhibition within a historical narrative. A fabulous 3D revitalized remake of Fragonard’s at the time groundbreaking depiction of love, it was without question one of the highlights of the exhibition.  Vibrant – it incorporated as usual his ubiquitous Dutch wax cloth which points to the links between the increased wealth of the Western nations and the economic benefits of the slave trade – playful, exuberant it was gorgeous. What a fabulous appropriation!

The exhibition continued by exploring the role pop culture has in framing ideas of self-love and its representation. Van Dyke showed how film and photographic conventions frame these explorations. Samuel Fosso’s stages himself as the star of his photographic work. He borrows the famous nineteenth century Odalisque pose in a grand gesture of self-affirmation.

Zwelethu Mthethwa’s portraits of South African individuals set in their homes decorated with advertisements, and movie posters are presented in this context as powerful images of an aspiring and affirmative self. They see themselves as participants in this consumerist society and not simple bystanders. Zanele Muholi’s photo stills of the proud gender queer Miss D’vine, give place and space to marginalized communities. To top it all, the tune of the Persuaders’ song Thin Line between Love and Hate, which was part of the minimal sound installation by Nadine Robinson, played incessantly in the background and I walked around in somewhat of dazed state. It had this hypnotic effect, which makes me think of the state one is when in love.

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s gorgeous paintings of single figures against non-identifiable backgrounds were a counterpoint to these highly cultured spaces.

Toyin Odutola’s exquisite portraits made with ballpoint pens and markers investigate in depth the skin, musculature, and hair of its subject becoming as Van Dyke says “ meditations on the singularity of the individual.”

All is not easy in interracial love: Ricardo Rangel’s photographs of couples in Maputo bars shows white men and black prostitutes embraced and dancing; yet, they are worlds apart.

I found it a relief to move away from images that quote the world of Western pop culture and sit in the yellow minibus ubiquitous to Lagos while listening through earphones to a young man in Lagos explaining what he was looking in a girlfriend.  This is the work of Lagos artist, Emeka Ogboh whose audio installation was commissioned with the expatriate Nigerian community in Houston in mind and brings the familiar sounds of home to them.

The exhibition ended with another piece by Yinka Shonibare: the video installation Odile and Odette, which explores ideas of mirroring.  Two ballerinas, one white, and the other black, dance most of the time perfectly synchronized on either side of a wooden frame, which creates the illusion that there is a mirror in between them. However, at other times they do fall out of sync and the illusion is broken.  Earlier in the exhibition, Joel Andrianomearisoa had addressed also effectively one’s desire to be mirrored in his installation (Darling you can make my dreams come true if you say you love me too) of 150 pocket mirrors and the impossibility of it.  I stood in front of the piece and could never get a full image of myself.

I liked pondering what is essential to human life.