ije uwa (lifes trajectory)

anyi akalo nka, mana obu ogudu anyi kalu nka,  2014, mixed media

chronicles of cosmic rhythm, 2014, mixed media on canvas

echoes from a forgotten era, 2014, mixed media on canvas

ego vs. self, 2014, acrylic on canvas

gaias dillemma, 2014, mixed media on canvas

geogenesis, 2014, acrylic on canvas

homo ludens, 2014, acrylic on canvas

schism 1, 2014, mixed media

conceptual man, 2014, mixed media on canvas

in our veins, 2014, acrylic on canvas

embryo series, 2014, acrylic on canvas

mkpuru (embryo series), 2014, acrylic on canvas

noogenesis, 2014, mixed media on canvas

of dreams, dogans and cockpits, 2014, mixed media on canvas

parallax of paradigms, 2014, mixed media

railroads to discord, 2014, mixed media on canvas

satori vs. entropy, 2014, acrylic on canvas

schism 1, 2014, mixed media

IJE-UWA (Life's Trajectory)

 GALLERY STATEMENT

Quintessence is delighted to show works of a promising artist called

Promise O’nali in an exhibition titled Ije Uwa ( life’s trajectory).

A product of University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Promise has shown

remarkable flair for arts from his primary school days. He had his first

solo exhibition in 2010; City of Refuge, CEW Gardens, Rumuomasi, Port

Harcourt.

However, he has taken part in a number of group exhibitions, some of

them include: “Exposition” (Enugu, 2003), “Salt of the Earth” (Enugu,

2004), “Parenting and Child Care” (Enugu, 2004), “Images of Africa”

(Enugu, 2004), “Dance of the Lyrical Lines II (Enugu, 2005). In

his words, “I was always driven by the brutal force of visual reality

and communication,” and that has also inspired this exhibition.

Ije Uwa or life’s trajectory is an inspiration from works of the Creator

of mankind. We all enjoy the great splendor of life because of creation

and our maker has endowed us with every good thing including the life

process.

Indeed art was the last act of our creator before He rested and is a great

communication tool for mankind and occupies a place of honor in the

world. It is a stamp of authority on the culture of a people. Ije Uwa is an

honor for life pregnancy, as we all enjoy the great splendor of life

because of creation.

Quintessence welcomes Promise to this exhibition opening on 25th

October 2014. They are works one characterizes as contemporary or

avant-garde art and will be a delight for collectors and art lovers.

MOSES OHIOMOKHARE

QUINTESSENCE GALLERY

satori vs entropy 2, 2014, acrylic on canvas

poetry for the open minded, 2012, acrylic on canvas

stiring, 2014, mixed media

ututu, 2014, acrylic on canvas

yin yang umunna, 2014, acrylic on canvas

nwoke na nwanyi, 2014, acrylic on canvas

crosses to bear, beares to cross, 2014, acrylic on canvas

Life is in a constant state of evolution, an embryonic stage that marks every aspect of our development as we strive for our limited ideas of perfection.
The journey of evolution, according to science, started way back some ten billion years ago with a Big bang. According to this view, the whole universe as we know it was born from a gigantic super-hot fireball, which rapidly expanded and cooled, condensing over billions of years into countless galaxies and a myriad of stars. Researchers today are beginning to paint a fairly detailed picture of what probably happened during this cosmic explosion. Of what happened before the big bang, physics has little to put forth. Time and space only came into being once the process began.(hard as that may be for us to grasp). Nor is there any known physics to describe what in the first one hundredth of a second of the big bang, when the temperature of the universe was well over a trillion degrees Fahrenheit, so hot that electrons, protons and other elementary particles could not exist. The most science can say about the universe during this time is that it was a state of pure energy, dense with electromagnetic radiation._in the beginning there was light
Religion believes that a force mightier and most powerful than anything we have ever imagined, created the universe and everything within it. This force, called GOD, is so mysterious that IT created everything by ITs mere words.

No matter how we look at it, these views have one thing underlining their different philosophies. It is called IJE UWA in my native Igbo language; evolution, mutation, transformation, a constant sojourn of forces, time, energy, matter, atoms, molecules, DNA, etc.

Evolution is a process, a series of chain reactions. The unfolding of the universe long before life appeared, the origin and development of matter from energy. Evolution has had many theories; spiritual, physical science, metaphysical, philosophical.
Art, like evolution, is a process. The transformation of a piece of canvas in an old merchant's shop to a masterpiece in an artist's studio to be enjoyed in a gallery or the living home of an art lover.
In 1922 the Russian mathematician Alexander Friedman showed that Einsteins theory of relativity predicted an expanding universe rather than a static one. All the galaxies appear to be rushing away from each other, as if thrown apart by some great explosion in the past.
We may not be physically endowed with the abilities or resources to look into the future at will but we just know that the physical universe is in a constant state of flux. Changing by the second, minute, hour, day....
Life's Trajectory transcends our daily search for meaning, it forebears our animalistic instincts for survival, it buttresses our ability to adapt to certain unfavorable changes, situations and environments. It paints clear pictures regarding how our bodies, systems, organs, tissues, cells, DNA take certain forms, shapes, sizes and colours as well as other characteristics that enable them adapt and function as best as they can in their bid to conserve life
Ije uwa tells the story of the evolutionary process of life from energy to matter to life and self reflective consciousness. Everything has a beginning, an incubation period, a birthing process, stages of evolution. Life is a journey of self discovery which in turn is the genesis of another journey. An on going self catalytic process that demystifies the mysteries that plague the experiences and the adventures we are entangled with as we go through it
                                                                                                                                         Promise O'nali

Foreword

It was the great bard the late Chinua Achebe who stated that “[T]he practical purpose of art is to channel spiritual energy into an aesthetically satisfying physical form that captures the presumed attributes of that force (Achebe 1984: xi).”  To all intent and purpose, this exhibition brings to public attention Promise Onali’s creative activities in the last few years to understand the practical purpose of art in order to attain a certain level of creative awareness, self-discovery, and intellectual development.  When the popular aphorism “man know thine self,” probably articulated at the temple of Apollo at Delphi, was affirmed by an ascetic monk in an old dingy castle in the English countryside, he may have had the artist in mind. The creative journey; that demanding (torturous or pleasurable) drive for self-discovery and knowledge must be embarked upon if the artist is to find visual eloquence. It is a “quixotic” search for perceptual and conceptual gravitas in that desire to articulate reality in its most graspable form.   

To become or to be addressed as the “artist-genius” is the zenith of articulation and affirmation in interpreting human experiences with the sensitivity that the task demands. At that level, the inner eye is fully developed and the artist is capable to subject “reality” to intense interrogation. Yet reality the sum total of consciousness is clearly the most abstract of concepts. It is spatial, temporal, physical, immaterial, and totalizing in both meaningful and meaningless ways. It is easier to understand reality as a social experience by beginning with oneself as a unit of sensation or consciousness in relation to space as the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues in Phenomenology of Perception.

Ije Uwa, the theme of this exhibition, is a popular Igbo philosophical thought that captures the intense complexity of consciousness; the physical and immaterial meanderings of human experience as it relates to the understanding of the universe and existence. Ije Uwa may also be considered as the notion of “fate,” that immaterial or cosmic force which charts our journeys through life as individuals. As our faces are different so are our individual fates.  My description of the notion is at best basic and does not fully capture the deep meanings of the adage. However, with Ije Uwa, Onali provides us with a prism into the confounding mysteries of life. It is an apt metaphor that succeeds in welding the disparate but connected ideas he explores in the body of paintings on view. We are gifted with a rare opportunity to experience the workings of the mind of an artist interested in giving visual expressions to the philosophy of life, particularly the understanding of “fate” as a social thought around which deep existential questions can be considered.

The works on display are a testimony to the truly remarkable strivings by Onali to understand consciousness and reality, two fraught concepts, and to condense them on the pictorial surface. In several of the paintings, pools of lava-like organic forms float like units of life in that eternal cycle of existence. While in others, splintered planes of colour fields’ present notional insights into the vagaries of life.  With work titles such as Satori vs Entropy, Ying Yang Umunna, of Paradigms and Dogmas, the viewer encounters an artist‘s deep search for meaning beyond the banal and profane. Onali’s painterly vision hovers at the intersection of the physical and the metaphysical and recalls the esoteric proclivity of the artist-mystic the late Boniface Okafor.

As we gaze upon the creative offerings in front of us and proceed to make subjective conclusions about how they appeal to our most innate desires, it is important to bear in mind that the artist’s duty in creating expressive forms is to distill the essence of reality thereby providing better understanding of human consciousness as part of the eternal energy of existence.

Happy Viewing!!!

Ugochukwu-Smooth C. Nzewi,

Artist, art historian, and curator,

Hanover, NH, United States.

Ije Uwa: Life’s Trajectory and Commencing Subjectivity

The title of this exhibition, considering the theme it has set out to spell and the visual means towards its realisation are emblematic. Ije Uwa: Life’s Trajectory is transcendental in conception. The works in this exhibition come within the category of the symbolic sign. And with the postmodern turn, because of their non-mimetic flare often encountered in symbolic art, it has also been referred to as speechless art or theatrical art. This category is in contrast to the mimetic art. In this brief preview I will offer subjective values on the works Promise O’Nali’ assembles in this exhibition, how they invigorate the exhibition’s title. I’ll engage the above focus in a limited scanning of some select works he has put out.

Promise O’Nali’s corpus here consists of a series of works that have been consistent with a style he has developed over the years. In this collection, O’Nali comes clean with compositions that are bereft of discernible forms, except for their biomorphic resonations. There is no doubt that this style; a non-figural re-translation of the Uli convention is associated with Professor Obiora Udechukwu as its precursor. The style, over the years, has been synthesised in the renditions of many artists like Tayo Adenaike, Krydz Ikwuemesi among others, who are graduates of the University of Nigeria Nsukka’s Department of Fine and Applied Arts. In the hands of Professor Udechukwu, a definite surrealistic flare comes to view along with his concerns for the masses. In the past, exploring the inherent lures of this style, O’Nali defined figural subjects whose dazzling formal flows intertwined in dazzling earth colours, became epochal in his known style in the main. With O’Nali the style evoked the surrealistic traits associated with its origins. The absence of that inclination in this collection, while distilling an essentially enmeshing and embroiling formal flow, locates O’Nali in a given otherworldliness.

The dominantly spiral as well as potential fusions the works in the compositions manifest, as style, bring to mind cosmological ideas. The world is round (so studies in geography narrate), and was made out of a formless void as the Bible narrates it. The eternal recoils and seeming atmospheric configurations that dominate vision in these works are reminiscent of the title of this exhibition. However, in Rail Roads to Discord, which manifest as strict angular lineal forms, though in apparent contrast, counterpoints a dominant agenda of spirals and seeming swooning flows in the works set out here: It thus creates a visual balance that is necessary to this exhibition as a design project.

Locating Rail Roads to Discord within the rhythmic flows of the dominant curvilinear drifts hemmed in quadrangular frames, it suggests an atmospheric clatter associated with the thunder and seeming violent fragmentations of the heavenly space (especially with the dark rain-bearing clouds called nimbus). The work Rail Roads to Discord is structured on a tripartite segmentation that is intriguing as it is emblematic. The blue segment, which initiates the composition from the top right orientation towards the left, is composed of irregular quadrangular forms that may have each broken from a large unit of a boulder, which could still be pieced together. This is as their jig-saw-like delineations are still set unperturbed. As the eyes progresses towards the left these quadrangular shapes distil into the dominant drifting curvilinear forms. Its monochromatic colour of blue delineated in dark lines with an austere and obscure lone triangle in red hue gives added strength to this segment. The middle segment consists of strictly rigid angular forms of discernible shapes in diverse inclinations. This segment is earth-colour dominated and terminates in an irregular division with the third segment composed entirely of dark hues.

This composition embodies the essence of this exhibition. It encapsulates, as it were, the heavens, earth and the void that hosts the galaxies. The composition also contains within it the dominant colours in the overall compositions. In the work the tension between the “organomorphic” and the “mechanomorphic” and the harmony between both formal categories are lucidly articulated. While the organic forms relate to life, the mechanical forms point to interventions by human communities in what nature has provided. Put together the delicate tensions between nature and the intervention of humans in nature is suggested. In this regard Rail Roads to Discord can as well be Rail Roads to Concord. Metaphorically, the organic world consisting of eggs, embryos, growing buds and fruits contrast the rigidly made and manipulated alternatives that characterise many human-made things. In a physical sense, the works that complement Rail Roads to Discord are Of Paradigms and Dogmas and In Our Veins. They are complementary to the tensions that characterise human existence especially at intracultural and intercultural levels. Such interactions often throw up insulting and abusive attributions that characterise intercultural jabs. This is aptly conveyed in the text/image composition – In Our Veins.

In Our Veins throws up the dilemmas contemporary art propose. This is couched in the interface between word and image, which has always been of interest to art historians and critics for the sake of humanity. The enigma of the image as a sign/symbol must have given birth to the word. The word as an invention of the human is a signifier of the signified, which is the image. The postmodern culture, moving beyond representational or mimetic art now has thrown up more of speechless or non-mimetic art. Such genre devoid of visual corollary to the signifier has been labelled “theatrical art.” This is because, such works, without verbal equivalent with what they present demand extended contact to decipher the message they encode. O’Nali’s work in this exhibition is so dominated. But In Our Veins bridges this distance between form and meaning in speechless art as its textual impositions illuminate the composition.

However, considering the complex relationship between the image and the word, O’nali’s work here become suggestive in relation to their titles. In other words, the titles become the in-road to any meaning taken of a work. This is in spite of the dominant biomorphic configurations of the works, which evoke the exhibition’s theme. While in confrontation with the works, the overriding conceptions we have of our world come handy to satisfy our curiosities about the content and context of this exhibition. The world is round. It spins round on a circular trajectory. It hosts families of same/similar shapes in the galaxies. These are factual given as to the how of our world.

 Every artist exhibiting has only set out to provide some illumination regarding his or her experience of the world/society at any point in time in the deposited image. Any exhibition thus, as a set of propositions, is hinged on some contextual correlates. This exhibition happens to engage the ways of the world – Life’s Trajectories. In the hands of O’Nali, life’s trajectories have been projected as transcendental subjectivities. They are visual distillations of his envounters. The demand then is that we each seek out the bits of knowledge they encapsulate relative to our positions in space and capacities. This text is my own deduction regarding the story O’Nali has put together. Which is yours?

Frank A. O. Ugiomoh; PhD, fpaca, fsna, maica

Professor of art history and theory

Department of Fine Art and Design

University of Port Harcourt

Port Harcourt

Nigeria

Contemplating Ije Uwa

Since his days as a painting major at the University of Nigeria, Promise O’nali, has been fascinated with lines, as the atomic and underlying element of the work of art. This tendency is, perhaps, a residuum of the uli heritage that for decades defined the creative philosophy of the art department at the University of Nigeria. But beyond being the basic element in art, the line is also, for O’nali, a metaphor for the serpentine trajectory of the unending course of life. For as the Igbo say, “Ije uwa’n’aga k’agwo. Osi aka nni aga, si aka ekpe aga” (Life is like a snake; it moves to the right and to the left). It is this movement that O’nali seems to explore in this collection of paintings aptly titled Ije Uwa.

Like all artists, he is located at the twilight of experience where the right and left currents of life intersect. To this extent, what he captures for us in the paintings are the bitter-sweet deposits left along his heartscape by the unending tides of existence. But O’nali’s perception of ije uwa is totalizing. It is his way of contemplating creation or evolution, what I have called “the Story of Stories” elsewhere, the spiraling or cyclical nature of life and being. It is an experience the artist sees as having neither a clear beginning nor a finite end. The world is a big market, a large arena for unpredictable roles and challenges, where we are all captives of time. Time goes on and changes without really changing. But we change or are changed in the mill of time, being at the mercy of forces beyond our control.

Ije Uwa, like the snake, may move to the right and to the left. But it remains a one-way traffic that leads to a door that can be opened only from inside. In other words, at death ije uwa continues its one-way trajectory, albeit on transcendental terms. Not even the possibility of reincarnation subverts this logic, as the incarnate has not the capacity to tell where the previous existence ended and where the new one should begin. This reality underscores the futility of life itself and thus challenges us to examine some of the pains and pleasures that drive our mundane existence as we seek, as conditioned souls, to attain perfection through the imperfect means available in the material world.

Ije Uwa is full of pain and pleasure. Ije Uwa is sandwiched between birth and death. It is a journey in which we are both subjects and objects. We shape and are shaped by our environment; we shape and are shaped by the community and society in which we live. For O’nali, Ije Uwa, thus becomes a re-representation of our individual and collective relations with the forces that define our world and individual lives. The paintings capture in vivid colours and imageries the essence and futility of human strivings and struggles in a world that ever wears out peoples, civilizations, and achievements without ever being worn out itself.

In pursing the philosophical and instrumentalist essences of his works, O’nali addresses creative and extra-artistic issues in subtle ways. At the creative level, he uses colours as linear configurations and is not given to an extravagant palette. Although this has been part of the artist’s trade mark over the last few years, this lyrical approach acquires added meaning in the context of the theme of the present exhibition. In their graphic evocation of rivulets, the paintings are frozen imageries of life’s unpredictable movements with which the artist is concerned in the present exhibition. Thus the forms of O’nalis paintings offers us some insight into their meaning and iconography. For instance, the use of blues and earths reminds us of the colours of Enu na Ani(Sky and Earth), the chief elements in the dualism of Igbo cosmos and religious thought. Beyond colour symbolism and the allusion to the dominant forces in Igbo vernacular religion, the dualism essentialised in some of O’nali’s colour schemes also extend to other realms. After all, in the Igbo world, things and phenomena are perceived to be in twos: Ife kwulu, ife akwudebie.

There are also elements of music and poetry to be perceived in the paintings. The wavy, sinuous lines are graphic variants of music and poetry subtly combined to arrest both the eyes and the mind in sublime ways. It is not everyday music. Nor do the lines spire to the ideals of cultic chants. However, they harbour hierophantic qualities that distance them from the commonplace and imbue them with profound meanings.

O’nali’s paintings, thus, reaffirm the interconnection of the arts and their capacity to provide the creative person with the scared energies to fly without wings and to see with eagle eyes the reality above reality, otherwise known as the surreal. Despite their surrealist tendencies, O’nali’s paintings are about this world, its connection with the otherworld and our place in both.  Ije Uwa is about our world, our diverse sojourns in it, and how our footprints on the cosmic landscape have shaped and continue to shape the contours of things, phenomena, and existence.

Chuu Krydz Ikwuemesi

Painter, art critic and ethno-aesthetician

Associate Professor of Fine Art

University of Nigeria, Nsukka

ARTIST STATEMENT:

I was born into a generation of advent hip-hop culture. A generation that fosters creativity, design and play over work and academic inclinations.

And yes, I found inspiration, creativity, artistic and imaginative prowess from reading comic books as a child and so I collected a lot of them. I even drew a lot of comics of my own with my own invented characters.

Studying art at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka would have never been an option if my father had not died early because he wanted us all to be engineers and doctors. Come to think of it, I would have made a very good mechanical engineer because I collected a lot of stuff as a child. I used to have a box full of odds and ends, pieces of electronics parts, cassette player motors, rotors, bearings and a lot of stuff I would rather not mention. I used to love knowing how stuff works, always eager to disassemble electronics piece by piece just to know how they were put together. But above all, I loved drawing; it gave me a sense of purpose.

Being an artist has shaped my perception of life. I am more interested in the super-physical than the physical representation of things. I am more interested in how our nerve endings disperse energy and electric charges to give birth to very simple ideas and thoughts.

I have been inspired and awed by the works of El Anatsui, Nsikak Essien, Peju Alatise, Frank Stella, Ishamu Noguchi, Diana Al-Hadid, Adebayo Jones, just to mention a few.

I have also realized that people could teach you to write, draw, paint, sculpt, assemble, weave, carve etc. but nobody can really teach you how to be an artist. I owe my creative evolution to the eclectic nature of our hip-hop culture; always evolving and borrowing from every culture, norm and tradition it encounters. If I were born before the proliferation of hip-hop, my art would have evolved rather differently.

I draw inspiration from everything I come across, including but not limited to physics, chemistry, Biology, Astronomy, Psychology, Philosophy, Medicine, Sociology, Technology, Cybernetics, Systems theory, Economics, Christianity, Islam, Eckankar, Buddhism, Africa Traditional Religions, Poetry, Fashion, Music, Animation, Books, Magazines and Hip-hop.