Revelation at Owusu-Ankomah : Microcron Begins Exhibition at the October Gallery, London
Owusu-Ankomah-Microcron-Kusum-No-1-2011
"Amidst the galaxy of forms it appeared to me, the distillation of a lifetime of effort.....the Microcron constellation"
I had a revelation on the 25th of October 2014.
I was led to better appreciate the limitations of the corner of the universe that I occupy.
This
expansion of understanding of the conscription of my knowledge is also
framed by a sharper awareness of the fact that I am not sufficiently
informed to appreciate those boundaries because of the inadequacy of my
frames of reference.
How is one to grasp the limitations of one’s knowledge if one is not aware of the scope of what is to be known?
I
was privileged to see the exhibition of paintings, “Owusu-Ankomah :
Microcron Begins”, on its closing day at the October Gallery, London,
the 25th of October 2014 (
http://www.octobergallery.co.uk/exhibitions/2014ank/).
My
encounter with the paintings, with Chili Hawes, the Gallery director
and her friends, with Alana Pryce Tojcic, the artistic director, and
Nichol, the receptionist, human interactions which gave me a little
insight into the spirit involved in the management of such treasures of
achievement as the paintings represent, my brief visit to the nearby
Warburg Institute, embodying, in another context, the conjunction of
image and ideation that animates Owosu-Ankomah’s work and the
institutional environment required to adequately distill the
significance of such work, and my serendipitous meeting with Jotham
Munyarai on the train to London, discussing the potentially self
empowering and world shaping impact of one’s ambitions, ensured that the
man, myself, who went to London on the fateful 25th was not the same
man who returned from London.
The world characterized by
my perceptions has undergone a permanent shift, like a heretofore
immobile celestial body shifting decisively on its axis.
I
used to think I had been considerably exposed to the work of
Owusu-Ankomah, placing me in a position to make some statements of
significance about it.
I have been very proud of having contributed an essay to the monumental book on his art,
Owusu-Ankomah:
Microcron Begins, accompanying the multi-continent exhibition, recurrently pointing out this input to people.
I
now realize that, having relied wholly on pictures for my knowledge of
the artist’s work, I was equivalent to a person viewing a magnificent
room and the intricate sublimity of its contents from the opening in a
small keyhole, the details of these contents obscured, dwarfed to my
vision on account of the distances created by the immensity of the space
within which they are located.
I could see the objects
only in terms of dim outlines, with the few more brightly coloured
creations being easier to perceive in their essential forms, while the
greater number of constructs, less colourful but more intricate, being
only occasionally perceptible in their complex and subtle symmetry, this
greater number of structurations being as clear in their
distinctiveness as the starry sky seen within a dim pool of water.
My
previous acquaintance with the artist’s work is like perceiving a dot
in the night sky which is the best one can see of the light of a giant
star on account of the vast distance the light has travelled to reach
terrestrial eyes, a journey commencing at the beginning of time, but
reaching the earth only in the 21st century, having crossed space at the
speed of light, the fastest speed known to humanity.
The
technology might not yet exist to visualize most of Owusu-Ankomah’s
paintings in a form that can suggest, talk less represent accurately,
their glory.
As it is, I was privileged to walk into a
small, but significantly representative section of the vast space of
realization embodied by the artist’s work to date, the sheer volume of
his productivity making the marvelous offering at the exhibition a small
fraction of the whole.
Everything written up till this
point about Owusu-Ankomah, on a scale of 1-10 of possibilities of
explication, in which 10 stands for infinity, since the work’s
possibilities of explication are infinite, may be likened to the first
emergence into visibility of forms hitherto hidden in the myriad
multiplications of micro-organismic entities, or to put it another way,
the expression of the possibility of the existence of the universe, at
the dawn of time, as different from the materialization of the universe
itself, a preliminary sonic throbbing that suggests the mighty
magnificence slowly palpating into being.
All expositions
so far of Owusu-Ankomah’s work are at best basic groundwork, laying of
skeletal foundations, the construction of an antechamber, a foyer from
which people may walk into the grand hall yet to be fashioned.
What quality of his work inspires these superlatives?
It is not simply the sheer numerical scope or even the majestic size of some of the paintings.
It
is the living texture he has created from canvas, like the shaping of
an organic universe of his own, constituted by its own unique life
forms, suggested by the rippling concreteness of space in dialogue with
human and geometric forms, across a symphonic rhythm between works at
various scales.
It was the texture of the paintings’ surfaces and the vivid power of the images that first astonished me.
His
greater body of work is a sequence of paintings in stark black and
white, but the intricate symmetry and sheer visual potency of these
works never emerge in any pictures, online or in print.
That means 90%, if not more, of the power of the artist’s work is lost in translation from canvas to representational image.
Could a hologram, solve this problem, projecting images of the works in three dimensions?
Would
the images on which the holograms are based be able to capture the
dynamism of the network constituted by the raised surfaces of the
paintings, surfaces that demonstrate a palpitating tactility, a
physicality inviting caresses, a texture evocative of the dynamic
surfaces of rock and organic forms?
Would such attempts at recreating the art be able to project its suggestion of living space?
Would
it be able to make vivid the resonance between a sense of biological
dynamism and the dialectic of the anthropomorphic and the abstract, the
rhythm of the human form and the symbols in terms of which the human
being distills cognition, the relationships between abstraction and
concreteness that is core to Owusu-Ankomah’s work?
An
ideal representation of such art would be a form of virtual reality that
can simulate the organicity of the paintings’ surfaces, enabling one to
both see and touch the works, though in terms of a simulacrum, a
physical and a visual encounter that takes one closer to living
imaginatively in the work of art, achieving an increasingly intimate
bond with it as a concretization of cognitive possibility.
Who
knows, perhaps such a visual and tactile engagement with the works
could lead one to a transformative mental state in which one experiences
oneself as living inside the work of art, encountering its human
figures as living forms, perhaps even knowing oneself as those forms,
engaged in the quest for meaning that Owusu-Ankomah’s work dramatizes,
to the degree that such an ontological miracle is possible.
Can
such near ultimate encounter with art be simulated through technology,
thereby facilitating an understanding of the cognitive quest the art
represents?
I dream of buying all Owusu-Ankomah’s paintings and housing them in a gallery designed for the permanent display of his work.
The
work needs to be seen in its entirety, face to face, for its
overwhelming power to be experienced in a way that does justice to its
stupendous vision.
Meanwhile, it is imperative one takes
time to relate with these paintings individually, as intimately as
possible, spending a day, a week or more, interacting with one painting
at a time, meditating on it in its primary presence, not the secondary
presence of a representational image, so as to begin to attune properly
with its wealth of figural and abstract symbolism.
Such
intimacy of relationship needs to be complemented with breadth and depth
of scholarship in global symbolism, religious, scientific,
philosophical, artistic, and more perhaps, so as to help develop a
conceptual and expressive base to give voice, as one is able to hear it
at the intersection of generic and individual understanding, to the song
resonating from the symphony constituted by the human-abstract
dramatization that is the work of Owusu-Ankomah.
A gallery
devoted to his work could change its displays from time to time to
depict the various patterns, the different interpretive vantage points
in terms of which the artist’s work can be perceived.
Displays
of his Owusu-Ankomah’s could also include exhibitions that demonstrate
the prismatic range of his creativity in its potential for interaction
with other artists and disciplines with whom his work may be related
through a variety of associations.
Such exhibitions could
make explicit the artist’s dialogues with masters that have shaped his
work at the intersection of human physicality and ideation, such as
Michelangelo Buonarroti’s creations suggestive of Neo-Platonic
expressions of abstract ideal in material embodiment and of the
perfection of the soul expressed in the human body, Auguste Rodin and
his evocation of thought through the dynamism of the male form, William
Blake and his mythic masculinities within the context of his elaborately
verbalized philosophy, among others.
Other exhibitions
could correlate Owusu-Ankomah’s art with creativity across different
disciplines addressing similar subjects as he does at the intersection
of human embodiment and cosmological possibility.
These include the verbal art of Dante Aligheri, the consummating vision of his cosmological narrative the
Divine Comedy,
in its integration of human form and the image of the circle as
demonstrating human situatedness within infinity, converging with
Owusu-Ankomah’s similar visualization in the Microcron symbolism that
entices the questing human figures in his paintings.
Another
possible correlation is with the scientific cosmology of Michael Faux
and Sylvester James Gates, who use their self-created Adinkra
mathematical symbols in exploring the character of the universe.
Their
work references classical Adinkra symbolism in terms of visual
similarity and the scientists’ guiding philosophy of knowledge,
classical Adinkra being an inspirational matrix for Owusu-Ankomah in the
journeys within cosmological space his art depicts in terms of human
interaction with a variety of symbols.
Other
contextualization of Owusu-Ankomah’s work could include juxtapositions
with other artists demonstrating humanity’s engagement with symbols
across time, as in the continuity between symbolic representation in
classical and modern African and Asian art, represented, for example, by
Victor Ekpuk’s transformation of Nigerian Nsibidi symbolism and Sohan
Qadri’s recreation of Asian Tantric iconography.
The
director of the October Gallery, Chili Hawes, the artistic director,
Alana Pryce Tojcic and the receptionist, Nichol, were all wonderful in
their reception of me, Chilli even giving me some memorable food and
drink, on the house, all of them identifying with my efforts to make a
video of the exhibition and my response to it, a video I intend to
present on YouTube, hoping it came out well since I have not used that
camera for some time.
It is most helpful to undergo
experiences that help one appreciate the inadequacies of one’s position,
in general, and in particular instances, so that one may better
understand the scope of what one needs to achieve, the kind of
experience represented by my visit to the “Owusu-Ankomah : Microcron
Begins” exhibition at the October Gallery.
Image source :
Source : October Gallery
URL :
http://www.octobergalleryeducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Owusu-Ankomah-Microcron-Kusum-No-1-2011-Acrylic-on-canvas170-x-135cm-Image-courtesy-OG-London.jpg
That idea of water and immigration and overseas adventures...The idea of learning to float, learning to keep up with the sharks and swim with the fishes but in a good way..The idea of leaving the shallow-end and keeping afloat in the deep-end but the artist assures me that the material is his own invention. He tells me it is a mixture of paper, wood shavings and powder along with other secret materials. He blends them all together and creates a paste that is similar to the white plaster used on North African new builds. The paste is then shaped and left to harden in the sun and then once hardened Ernest then goes to work of shaping out his ideas around the mould with different coloured threds that binds the divination and holds the work together. The flashes of red in this piece denotes the sacrifice created and a Guinea Fowl is a very precious animal to give to the Gods...a prized bird indeed. The guinea fowl are a family of birds in the Galliformes order,
although some authorities include the guinea fowl as a subfamily,
Numidinae, of the family Phasianidae. So why the Guinea Fowl? The speckled hen...what is this bird? Where does
it come from? The origins are West African and this spectatular bird is
a symbol of safety in childbirth. The Guinea fowl is prized by
the French…largely ignored by the British and is a bird of legend that
has been used as food for thousands of years.
