“The intricacies of the imagined backdrop—landscape or interior—spill into the figures themselves, uniting them as one and the same. In many ways, the figures’ surroundings are an extension of their identities—a portrait of the tenor that they evoke.”
Representatives of State by Toyin Ojih Odutola is a masterful reinvention of courtly portraiture, rendered in opulent hue and undulating line. Executed between 2016 and 2017 and debuting as the centerpiece of artist’s pivotal exhibition at the Whitney Museum of Art, To Wander Determined, Representatives ofState envisions liberated and wealthy Africans as part of an alternative history, which presents a world in which colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade had never taken place. The present work is the centerpiece of a vibrant series of works linked by a fictional chronicle of two aristocratic Nigerian dynasties, the UmuEze Amara Clan and the House of Obafemi, which are joined in marriage by the families’ two male heirs. Presented as one out of a curated selection of works from the families’ private collects ion, Representatives of State offers an intimate glimpse into the exclusive societal machinations of Ojih Odutola’s fictious world. Deftly articulated through layers of pastel, graphite, and charcoal, Representatives of State is an iconic output from Ojih Odutola’s speculative and revolutionary artistic vision, which ultimately serves to investigate notions of socio-economic class, race, and gender through narrative inquiry.
In Representatives of State, Ojih Odutola sets out to depict African wealth and prosperity through traditional European modes of expression. Statuesque and poised, the four women of Representatives of State are government officials — members of Ojih Odutola’s fictional court — seemingly captured during a moment of repose in their duties, their gazes penetrating the viewer with intrepid strength and quiet elegance. Ojih Odutola fills the scene in Representatives of State with material markers of privilege and access: fashionably clothed, the regal bearings of the four figures command a palatial space that recalls the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles with its wide arched windows and checked marble floor. By portraying African characters with signifiers of affluence historically reserved for the European elite, Ojih Odutola not only empowers them with the capacity of dignified indifference — a cultural privilege rarely afforded to people of color — but also imagines and fashions new possibilities for historically oppressed people to exist outside the realities of the global colonial system. The artist has summarized her conceptual inquiry, saying, “What happens if the bodies that once were used as capital were left alone so their stories and ideas instead of their bodies traversed land and sea, creating spaces for themselves and expansion for others — how would one express the presence of the black figure in a picture then?” (Toyin Oji Odutola, “Taking Up Heirs,” The UmuEze Amara Clan and the House of Obafemi, New York, 2021, p. 11)
Ojih Odutola furthers the fictitious conceit around her conceptual exercise by inserting herself into the narrative. Casting herself as the Deputy Private Secretary of Udoka House, Lagos in the epistolary prelude to the series of works in To Wander Determined, Ojih Odutola removes herself as the artist and instead takes up the role of guardian of these fabricated histories. Indeed, the leftmost figure in Representatives of State resembles Ojih Odutola due to the headwrap and heeled boots that function as her sartorial signatures throughout her oeuvre. Amid this coterie of diplomats, representatives, and high-ranking civil servants like herself, this self-portrait of Ojih Odutola looks out past the frame of the work, acknowledging the world that lies beyond the immediate scene.
“Can black subjects be plausibly depicted as possessors of wealth and trustees of (Anglo) aristocratic lineages rather than as vassals who produce and safeguard the wealth of others? Ojih Odutola’s portraits suggest that this proposition isn’t.mes rely a matter of mise-en-scène… nor is it simply an inversion in which the expected white sitter is replaced by a black one. Rather, her work demands understanding of the ways in which black bodies might inhabit such spaces. Gesture, posture, and a kind of tactile relationship to domestic interiors and material objects become important ways of communicating black protagonists in possession of their surroundings and themselves.”
Born in Ife, Nigeria in 1985 and raised in Huntsville, Alabama, Ojih Odutola draws from her personal experience as an African immigrant, through which she has developed a complex understanding of selfhood as innately multivalent. For her, the intricacies of Black identity are expressed through her rendering of skin tones – a range of which are explored in Representatives of State. Ojih Odutola has honed this intention of eliciting from her surfaces the luminosity of black skin throughout her practice. “When I draw the skin of my subjects, I really want people to travel throughout them,” Ojih Odutola has stated, “The surface isn’t something I trifle with. In the making of the work, skin is the geography I travel in order to discover each individual and his/her story. With every line I mark up, I map out the territory of their realities.” (the artist quoted in: Rujeko Hockley and Melinda Lang, "Toyin Ojih Odutola: By Her Design," Whitney Museum of American Art, 2017 (online)) Taking cues from practitioners such as Mary Cassatt, who is deeply associated with her use of pastel in the late nineteenth century, Ojih Odutola creates labyrinthine passages of tonal gradation in her depictions of flesh. As with other media, she approaches pastel not simply as a tool for loosely rendered sketching, but as a way to build up layers through shading and blending, often with her fingers, creating a velvety texture deliberately reminiscent of painting. This mastery over her medium is on full display in Representatives of State, through exquisitely articulated moments of translucency and luster within folds of fabric.
For Ojih Odutola, criticality lies between the lines. Through Representatives of State, Ojih Odutola points to the multiplicity of meanings associated with affluence and privilege: history, kinship, storytelling, wealth, and power. Odutola pushes at questions of ownership and class, especially as it relates to historically oppressed bodies. She has crafted a unique approach to presenting narrative: intent on imbibings her portraits with a sense of self-possession and ease, the artist constructs her scenes with no recapping or explanation. At once political and poetic, her visual language bestows her Black subjects with the luxury of self-determination, with dreams of utopian futures, and above all, the radical freedom to imagine other possible worlds than the one we live in today.
Toyin Ojih Odutola, shortlisted artist of the Future Generation Art Prize 2019
