OSAHENYE
KAINEBI: SEVEN YEARS AFTER
Professor
Yusuf Grillo
Some
seven years ago, I visited the humble studio of this ex-student
of mine at Festac Town. It was immediately obvious to me then that
this was a young man (27 years old) who was sincere and determined,
who had a vision and recognised the immense difficulty along the
path he had chosen to realise his vision.
Looking
at his recent works, I can only congratulate him on "holding his
course" undeterred and maturing steadily in ideas and technique.
He is, as he was 7 years ago, still a painter of ideas in the expressionist
style. He has however got more confident, in some cases, daring.
He
now paints very large canvases in a way that seems to tell the canvas
"you are not large enough". His colours, in the true "expressionist"
tradition are strong, pure and eloquent.
Kainebi
has never been an illustrative artist per se. He is progressing
further and further away from illustrative art like a scientist
in the process of distillation. Abstraction is like distilling the
essence out of a. jumble of visual images and evidently, this is
Kainebi's goal.
He
has become more philosophical too. His subjects are thought-provoking
- like listening to a preacher who is not afraid to drive home the
bitter truth. His Before the tempter came" is a very fascinating
work.
The
audacity of the tempter who bursts into sacred grounds and the audacity
of the tempted who rebels against the awesome authority of her master
find appropriate expression in the audacity of the artist - in the
inspired way he breaks up the large space, the precarious way he
balances void and form, lines and colour.
Kainebi
is trying out "collage" on some of the canvases. It is more of "montage"
in intention since the pieces of paper assembled are not just shapes,
colour and texture but they, in themselves, carry verbal messages.
This is a new direction the progress of which I intend to watch.
Kainebi
has left the Festac Town studio and now paints from a more spacious
studio in Maryland.
The
fact that he has survived for about a decade, uncompromisingly doing
what he believes in, shows that we do have (happily) some visually
literate patrons around. Without such patrons, the Picassos of our
time would be in the lunatic asylum or six feet under.
February,
1998.
Citation
Format:
Grillo,
Yusuf. (2000). OSAHENYE KAINEBI: SEVEN YEARS AFTER, in Osahenye Kainebi's
exhibition CLEAR, PURE & VIVID. Ijele: Art eJournal of the
African World: 1, 1 [http://www.ijele.com/ijele/vol1.1/].
