I met Demilade almost a decade ago, while making incessant journeys to Chief Nike Okundaye’s Nike Art Gallery. Working as a curator and an official of the Art Galleries Owners Association (AGAN) and National Gallery of Art Nigeria.

Based on Mama Nike’s ability to create genuine cordial interfaces in her art space, Demilade and I bonded as a precursor to another serendipitous meeting at the studio of Nyemike Onwuka. Demilade was a fastidious studio assistant working with Nyemike on an exhibition “Exodus”, which I was curating and documenting the oeuvres of Nyemike at that period. Demilade’s creative trajectory from my point of view has subtle undertones of influences from that epic exhibition and his exuberant internship at Nike Art Gallery.

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I believe this organic fall out is part of the retinue in this debut exhibition at Olori Art Gallery, which is also an organic harvest of Nike Art Gallery. My consistent studio visits at Nyemike’s studio, during Demilade’s occupation there, has given share insight to the evolution of the influences of Demilade’s repertoire using the barometer of time and journey.

Wavering between figuration, abstraction and a conceptual approach, Demilade’s body of work are inextricably linked to is imagination and experiences illustrating the complexities of being a young artist in the millennial age especially Nigeria. This exhibition brings together a documentary exploring his imaginative records of movement in socio-political and economic elements in Lagos where he is based, relative to the world at large.

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Lagos continues to evolve as a centre of history and culture. Lagos is a site of diverse background, cultural activity, political vitality, visual stimuli, artistic contemplation and creative production. Everyday changes are witnessed by its residents and experienced by tourists and visitors from all over. Mapping the sequence of the passing time and serial changes evokes an awareness of fleetness, ephemeral and sometimes doubt in the present. Using visual representation to invite the viewers to a question, the artist has shown that his art is being fed off the environs by drawing on the inspirations around him, as an observer and a participator. Through the process of social commentary, he unravels his environ using various explorations to compose multiple and recurrent viewpoints.

Modernism argued that art can be about the unseen - It can give form to the formless in other words, art can be about internal realities - feelings, imagination, fantasies and dreams the spirit experiences that transcend or underlie the purely visible. No matter the approach you use, art is fundamentally about the maker. The artist has employed a colour language with certain affinities, both individual and independent, to raise questions and interests. The colour language is tweaked by the elements of the search engines, like Google and the rest of them. The blurry portraits have similar to the colour bar - a tool that the society of motion picture and television engineers used to test pattern in television and video broadcasts and circulation.

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These amorphous portraits exude cacophony of ideals, visual curiosities with transient and innate characters. Anonymous faces withholding and dispersing information at the same time maybe in conceding to Vasily Kandinsky’s view that theorized a form of artistic expression that would reject the materialist world in favour of emotional or spiritual ideals, using abstract forms and colour to evoke inner preconscious world. These portraits portray fluidity, movement that are obvious yet questionable, indefinite forms fused into the past, present and unknown future, halo effect being crowned on the homeless and desperate character, reminiscent of recycling or salvaged art by which regeneration of materials occurs, giving a castaway a new form.

 

"How can you be an artist and not reflect the times? That to me is the definition of an artist."

Nina Simone

 

"Artist are here to disturb the peace."

James Baldwin

 

The artist assumes the position of a protagonist and antagonist in portraying the character in his paintings. He had contemplated migrating to Canada as a journey of so-called Golding Fleece, a trend associated with a considerable populace in Nigeria. He was dissuaded by his instinct or probably heeding to a call by another artist, Ndidi Dike, who through her installative exhibition “Waka - Into - Bondage: The Last 3/4 Mile”, at CCA Lagos had this to say

“can one ever imagine the deep sense of loss and total despair felt by immigrants that consciously propel themselves to sacrifice the ties that bind them to their land, emotion, history, culture, and very existence”

But when the migrational bug sets in some have become unguarded. Akin to Banquo’s statement to Macbeth

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“but ‘tis strange oftentimes to win us to our harm.

The instrument of darkness tells us truths”

 

These instruments are disguised as global cultural curiosity manifesting dualism: strength and uncertainty, figurative to abstractions, subjectivity to blur, community to self, saints to vagabonds, inconsistent to consistent. All these dimensions amalgamate to personal narratives, the personal becomes the communal. Sometimes these journeys have some have come with loss of identity, history replaced by inequality and misery, vulnerability and fear.

The complex and intricacies of movement from countries of seeming unfavourable social, political or economic realities are manipulated as potent visual language to comment on social, political and economic issues affecting the lives of Nigerians, Africans and global territories. Difficulties of migration are represented by fractured, disrupted and deconstructed faces to reawake what was the past, in an edgy present looking forward. These portraits call for introspection in relation to shared struggles and experience of people in these territories.

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The history of art relates a story of acculturation, the central force that ultimately initiates changes in art. Art is affected by political, economic and social changes brought on by invasion, revolution, religious upheaval and new technologies. And is constantly changing and developing due to the everyday contact and exchange between differing Nigerian cultures. Because Nigerians are relatively accessible to one another, changes may take place slowly through peaceful contact and trade with neighbours. Furthermore, artists are directly impacted by the works of other artists within their own community as well as by objects encountered from foreign nations. The art renditions presented in this exhibition are convergent in nature whereby the artist has laid his standard in making his decision about his visual presentations as a cross-cultural inspiration borne out of its implications.

 

Time is like a river made up of the events which happen, and a violent stream: for as soon as a thing has been seen, It is carried away and another comes in its place and this will be carried away too.

Marcus Aurelius.

 

In recent decades, memory has been assaulted from all sides. The designs and interests of the hegemonic system, along with intercultural transmissions facilitated by knowledge and experience of the ways others remember and preserve their past - and therefore, the existence of the universal culture of the mass - present a challenge to our supposedly differentiated past. The growing cultural worldliness, the accelerated technological development, the effects of globalization and corporate models have managed to constantly interfere in each and every realm of our social and political life. And at every opportunity threaten and question those referential signs and narratives of the past.

When you think of what you have left behind, when you write about it, when you read its multiple official, collective or personal stories, when you look over the books, the photos, the culture and history that order it’s past, and when you realize and try to document its present or preserve what is left for one of its possible futures, it is impossible for you to evade each and every one of those questions that decompose the coherent reflection of what you were, of what you are, and of what you could be. Not only has memory transformed your subsequent experience, but that experience has simultaneously been responsible for altering the original memory that you supposedly had.

The significance of the past, then, has been transformed. The significance and the form are not in the events, but in the systems that transform those events into present “historical facts”. This is equivalent to recognizing the function of human construction as creators of meanings, which implies that a single essentialized, transcendent concept of “genuine historicity” does not exist. The past, therefore is something different from its history, and memory could be a construction that follows the experience of the past. The past, one could then say is not the main agent that determines consciousness? But where do so many questions lead you? Nothing about this makes you unique or special. Dugan suggest you go to Egypt, that you go to look at The Sphinx.

 

It’s falling apart. He sits

on water in the desert

and the table shifts.

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He has lost his toes

in the sand blasts

of the Saharan winds

of mere a few thousand years.

That Mamelukes shot up his face,

because they were iconoclasts,

because they were Musketeers.

The British stole to his beard

because they were imperialist thieves.

It is in the cellar of the British Museum

where the Athenians lost their marbles.

 

To what extent have these questions contributed to the formation of your character, your tastes, your aversions, your secrets and your neurosis?

 

 

 

Burns Effiom

October 2021

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