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.