Soto InCharred Visions: Textures & Tensions

In continuation of its support for Nigerian art and artists, Soto Gallery, recently presented Charred Visions: Textures & Tensions, an exhibition of works by the talented trio of Uche Uzorka, Chukwumereogo Okeke and Uche Joel Chima.

Featuring newly-commissioned works across painting, works on paper and installation, the show drew attention to charcoal’s long history as an artistic medium, dating as far back as early cave paintings to its use among renaissance artists in preparatory sketches.

The artists in this show, in extending and complicating this history, located their use of charcoal within long, rich traditions in contemporary African art.

In Uzorka’s drawings on paper, abstract shapes, markings and geometric patterns revealed the artist’s interest in a spare but distinct expressive plane, where the instinctive gestures of the hand, charcoal’s richness of tone, and the allowances of paper inform each other. This way, he works against and beyond any determined outcomes, instead, allowing the interaction of these forces to yield a range of possibilities. Along the dominant grey-black spectrum of his drawings, the viewer sees alterations in rhythm and mood, where Uzorka might have altered the pressure or angle of his stroke, where the charcoal might have crumbled and become finer and less dense and where the surface of the paper might have risen or flattened.

Combining charcoal, acrylic, and pastel in paintings whose blend of allegory and sharp social critique seize on timely issues of patriarchy, gender equality and ownership in Igboland and wider Nigerian culture; Okeke’s works on display, comprised the artist’s latest body of work, The Visitors.

With this title, Okeke referenced the precarious status of women and girls who, raised to accept the primacy of male authority, are passed between father and husband and are discouraged from attaining independent means of livelihood and social recognition. Drawing from her experience as a first daughter, Okeke likened human forms to landscapes, illuminating the deep connections between claims to and conquest over territory and the process by which political, cultural, and religious institutions maintain and legitimise the objectification of women as a class.

Chima’s mixed-media works found a compelling meeting point between Uzorka’s material-oriented research and Okeke’s socially-engaged themes.

Working with an extensive repertoire of mediums including aluminum sourced from single-use beverage cans, copper wire, acrylic, and charcoal, Chima’s installations, within an ongoing body of work he titles Earthen Vessels, extend the artist’s preoccupation with humanity’s often tense and uncertain relationship with its mortality and with the environment that supports its existence. The direct consequence of avoidable and unavoidable processes of degradation, attempts to salvage the essence of our spiritual and cultural lives against the backdrop of wider social forces remain key concerns.

Charred Visions: Textures & Tensions showed fresh insight into the diverse applications of charcoal as an artistic medium and invites deeper reflection on its social, economic, and environmental impact in Nigeria, where the frequent felling of hardwood trees, bolsters the country’s charcoal production, making it a significant export.