KOOP Projects, Brighton
23 September to 14 October, 2023
Curated by Naomi Edobor
It’s Saturday evening and I have spent part of the afternoon in Kemptown, the eastern quarter of Brighton. Sapele Neon Boy is the first show I have visited since attending the Turner Prize press preview in Eastbourne a couple of weeks ago. My review of the Turner is written but I am not happy with it. The show or the writing. But this small selection of works by Joshua Uvieghara at KOOP Projects has woken me from my slumbers. I am going to write this in one draft, check the grammar and publish with a few of my iPhone snapshots. Be damned.
Painting. Thank goodness someone is still painting. I mean, making really good paintings. Producing paintings that grab you and demand your attention. It’s a tough ask these days as visual artists work in so many media. Maybe some ‘alternative media’ artists are really painters at heart, but trends and expectations have taken them off course. For a while, at any rate.
Joshua Uvieghara has been painting for many years. His work should be seen more. Much more. Why? You may well ask. As a fellow painter I am hopelessly biased towards painting. So I know about the relentless challenges and frustrations, including the dangers of repetition and lying in a safety net of satisfaction with what’s okay. And I know that painting is nothing new. It’s been around for so long, after all. But painting is inexhaustible even though it has had to assert itself from modernist decade to post-modernist decade. Painting involves the application of paint onto a surface, often canvas. Paintings never really work on the computer or iPhone screen. There’s no true texture, the size is wrong and the exhibition context is destroyed. The human sense of visual experience and reception is curtailed by digital technology, as technologically clever as it is. Uvieghara’s paintings, like many others of course, have to be seen in the flesh. They should also be seen more because they are, actually, more than visual imagery.
Uvieghara’s paintings often visually unsettle. His tactile combinations of out of the tube colour can appear crude and raw. He uses all six primary and secondary colours – often on the same canvas. Going crazy with colour can create one hell of a mess – but not in Uvieghara’s work. The viewer must hang on in there when first looking at one of his canvases – or fourteen or so at KOOP. Thank goodness there is still somewhere in Brighton that displays quality contemporary painting from time to time. The city is full of artists, but there are few places to show work. Hopefully the situation will change before too many people have left for pastures new. But I digress.
In Sapele Neon Boy figurative imagery jostles with the expressionistic abstraction of the twentieth century. Indications of landscapes, places and people coexist with paint applied, sometimes, in a hurry. But always with hard won experience, and certainly with self-confidence. Colour clashes; paint is laid down and left as it is. Paint sometimes drips, but mostly just sits there. The colour combinations could be enough for pure abstraction, but there is subject matter of a highly personal nature too. If there was nothing personal there would be no reason to paint, I suspect. This vicarious nature in/of painting is clearly intended. Taken into the illusionism of space and time, but soon (abruptly) brought into the present by the physical and visual qualities of the painting, Uvieghara’s paintings evoke a living body that is both coming into being and tragically disappearing into the past. Through incompleteness, or imagery taking hold of something concrete, there is a sense of searching too. The work is autobiographical yet universal. Identity is cultural and geopolitical as well as individual. The artist’s personal, familial history, linked to Nigerian and Dutch heritage, will encompass so many cultural and political facets – but there’s enough leeway for the viewer to consider their own sense of selfhood, individuality and identity. At least that was the effect the work had on me.
I found some of the portraiture almost emotionally painful, despite the use of bright, gorgeous colour and even gold leaf in one work. Maybe ‘painful’ is too strong an expression. Mirrors and photographs reveal so much and so many people. Uvieghara’s portraits have this unfathomable quality. I was reminded that our pasts are present, even if not always across continents: even if remaining a mystery. The science of DNA has opened doors to the past. We are individuals who know that we are not totally so distinctive and unique. But so many stories are forgotten, secretly hidden or just too distant to recollect. Painting can reconstruct: even as simulacra, as substantive new territory as real as the forgotten or submerged real. Whatever that is.
Visit this exhibition if you can and watch out for any future shows from one of Brighton’s pre-eminent painters. Painting is alive and, well… available to conjure something for the restless imagination.
Links:
KOOP Projects – https://www.koopprojects.com
Founded in 2022 and based in Kemptown, Brighton, Koop Projects is a neighbourhood gallery with an international outlook.
The gallery believes in Contemporary African art and artists as a dynamic source for learning and change, promoting sustainable art practices through an interrogation of materiality and the contexts in which artists across Africa make and show their work.
We support our local art community through the gift of space. Opening doors for artists, curators and creative people with stories to tell, by providing them with space in which to realise their projects.
In the future, the gallery hopes to develop connections and conversations between creative communities in Africa, Brighton and beyond.
Joshua Uvieghara – https://www.joshuauvieghara.co.uk
Ruminations: Exhibition Reviews 