Osaretin Ugiagbe: A View from Amman

By Alfred Mac Adam for the Brooklyn Rail

Installation view: Osaretin Ugiagbe, A View From Amman, New York, 2023. Courtesy of SLAG&RX and the artist.

 

On View

Slag & Rx Galleries
Osaretin Ugiagbe: A View from Amman
October 26 – January 13, 2024
New York City

While you embrace Osaretin Ugiagbe’s fascinating paintings at Slag & RX Galleries, it is worth keeping in mind the necessary slippage between the signifier and the signified. In the case of proper names, for example, the sign is a mark of identity: there can only be one Osaretin Ugiagbe, but who he is for himself and who he is for others is a matter of perception. The same can easily be said of his paintings, and it is the idea of such misperceptions and lost meanings that should guide us through his show.

Ugiagbe’s seventeen oils on canvas included here have formal affinities with the work of Édouard Vuillard in that both artists enact or parody precepts of Gestalt psychology by presenting a totality that is simultaneously more and less than the sum of its constituent elements. Vuillard’s figures always seem about to be absorbed by the background, while Ugiagbe’s too meld with their setting. In both cases, it is only by examining the individual painting at very close range that we clearly perceive the individual parts. So, especially in the case of Ugiagbe, perceiving the work is a two-part process: first the totality, then the relationship of part to part. In effect, Ugiagbe wants us to notice the things we gloss over when we look at a painting or a person, something we can only do if we pause the entire process.

The show’s title is our first opportunity to misunderstand. A View from Amman might be the title of an editorial attempting to give the Jordanian interpretation of some issue, or it might be the opening of a description of what we see as we leave the city of Amman. In fact, the work has little or nothing specific to Amman except for the fact that Ugiagbe visited Amman, a place about which he knew almost nothing, but where, as the exhibition text tells us, he felt himself a welcome stranger. So, he would be looking at Amman and seeing what, exactly? A Gestalt he would identify as a city made up of streets and buildings, even if he had no idea what might be behind that façade. In a very similar manner we might take a quick look at his paintings, perceiving them but not really seeing them.

Osaretin Ugiagbe, Red Blouse, 2021. Oil on Canvas, 48 x 48 inches. Courtesy of SLAG&RX and the artist.

 

The magnificent Yellow Plate (2022), at 48 by 48 inches one of the larger paintings here, is a case in point. The title refers us to the bright yellow plate placed before an indistinct character seated at a table, suggesting that what matters here is the plate. After all, except for the green shirt of the character, the plate is the only bright, eye-catching element. But to see the plate is to miss the person. In fact, we do not see a person at the table, only some vague humanoid figure. But that is exactly Ugiagbe’s point: we can never see the person, only our ephemeral perception of the person.

Red Blouse (2020) is another case of misdirection. There is no red blouse, just a female figure wearing a pointillist dress that drips onto a sofa. An overturned vase of flowers adorns the table next to her. Again, the eye is drawn to the flowers, but, as with the yellow plate, they are not the point of the work. Ugiagbe holds the emotional content of the work—the woman’s despair or anger or relief—at a degree of remove; it must always remain a mystery to us. The unfathomable also dominates Two Lines (2022), nominally a still life with a table in the foreground holding some unidentifiable objects and a broad swath of pinkish paint creating a horizon line. A vertical column on the right pierces the pink and connects to the dark band of sky at the top of the painting. Not Cubism and not Matisse, but a disturbingly serene composition that despite its tranquility projects ominous malaise.

 

Alfred Mac Adam is Professor of Latin American literature at Barnard College-Columbia University. He is a translator, most recently of Juan Villoro’s Horizontal Vertigo (2021), about Mexico City.

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