“I’ve lost a few friends because of my art” says Adjani Okpu-Egbe standing in the basement of the Mok Space gallery opposite the British Museum. “Girlfriends too. I didn’t have time to go out. It’s expensive, buying canvas and paint brushes. But I was so depressed that it was therapeutic.”
Okpu-Egbe’s determination to succeed is clear. His talent,
too, is apparent. In the past year he has put on his first solo London
exhibition (‘Letting Go’ at Mok Space), appeared on the BBC’s Diamond Jubilee coverage
painting in front of millions, exhibited in New York and Los Angeles and now
returns to London with a new show ‘Community Man’ at the Brick Box in Brixton
market.
His remarkable journey as an artist is barely a year old.
Self-taught, he only seriously began painting in earnest after a bad injury
whilst on duty with the British Army in Kuwait in 2009 caused him to become
physically immobilised and so depressed that painting was the only form of
therapy that gave him purpose and happiness. “If it wasn’t for my art and my
daughter I wouldn’t be here right now” he tells me while we chat about less
profound but equally meaningful subjects (football and women). Football in fact
is a big inspiration to his work and explains a lot about how and why he became
an artist. Born in Cameroon his early dreams, like most, were to become a
footballer.
“My father was a business man and wanted me to follow him
but I was not interested in his lifestyle. He didn’t allow me to play football.
I had an opportunity to play at an academy but my father chased the men away. I
was forced to do Maths but I would just paint pictures of famous footballers.
Maradona, Roger Milla, Gary Lineker…who's that other guy with the long hair…for
Marseille…? ” After some deliberation I realise he is talking about ChrisWaddle. Some of Adjani’s friends went on to play for club sides in Cameroon and
had trials in England. Meanwhile he was forced to stay in doing maths
equations. If his father caught him painting pictures of footballers he would
beat him. “Sometimes I wouldn’t have time to flip the page over [when I heard
him coming] so I’d start doing my mathematics on top of my artwork. So if you
look at every piece of work there’s a maths equation in it – straight from my
childhood.”
Later, he moved to England and joined the British Army. Many of the
pictures in his collection were painted in his tiny room on the military base
at Abingdon in Oxfordshire while recovering from injuries sustained on duty.
Two years ago, during the aftermath of the London riots he was painting in the
street, trying to encourage youths and re-instil a sense of community
togetherness when he was arrested by the police who alleged he had looted a
t-shirt. He produced the receipt for the t-shirt he had in fact bought but they
ignored his claims and he ended up on the cover of the Wandsworth Guardian. Ultimately, the
attention may have helped him but the incident highlighted a disturbing trend
in indiscriminate policing that followed those dark days of summer.
So, what does his art represent? “Social injustice really pisses me off” he says. “I can hear just a comment. Sometimes I eavesdrop. I can change direction, follow people, paint what they say. Most of the work is autobiographical and I’m very prolific. I can start painting whenever, if I’m pissed off and have nothing to paint on I will paint on your shoes.”
He’s not just saying this for effect, he’s wearing an
outrageously colourful pair of converse painted beautifully in his usual
acrylics. Later he posts on facebook pictures of his flat where he has
spontaneously painted nearly every surface and door in the place. I wonder what
the landlords will think of that…
'The Blackwhite Conundrum' by Adjani Okpu-Egbe
How to describe his style? Basquiat meets Ofili meets Miro
meets Matisse? His work is a (forgive the pun) riot of colour
and distorted figures, warping into scenes that are at the same time familiar
but twisted into something more surreal. The tube carriage, for example in The
Blackwhite Conundrum, is recognisable with its handrails and seats, but the
tiny seats (almost details) are drawn comically small, Lowry-esque, and
occupied exclusively by white figures. In the foreground a veiled Muslim woman
wearing a remembrance day Poppy and holding the hand of her child stares out of
the canvas. Her body, the fabric of her hijab, frayed and torn appears to pour
itself liquidly over the floor, as though she is melting inside, or being
eroded away by chemicals. The child has her back to us, staring down the
carriage as though down a vortex to another dimension. Above there is no roof
to the tube, instead we seem to be looking up into the stars and swirls of the
night skies. A Metro newspaper litters the ground, a beautifully depicted
reference to that which binds London’s commuters together – ignorant tabloid
free journalism. The piece is clearly a comment. But on what? My reading is
that it speaks of the self-consciousness of the ‘other’ in London society. The
minority figure who is as British as anybody in the tube carriage but feels a
sense that they stand out, that they are awkward and are being looked at.
Stared at even. The veiled woman stares at us pleadingly. It captures that
moment we’ve all experienced in London when you make eye contact with a woman
wearing a headscarf and she looks at you, clearly smiling unseen, and her eyes
say “despite all appearances I’m just the same as you and everybody here.”
The slightly mangled, amorphous heads, eyes and images as well
as the splashes of paint resembling bodily fluids like blood remind us of
Francis Bacon’s dark brooding works – but in Okpu-Egbe’s images there is less
of the darkness and more of a kind of buoyant confused disorientation. I sense this disorientation in his manner. He is a buzzing
restless chap. You sense his brain is literally overflowing with ideas and that
there’s not enough hours in the day to get them all down on canvas.
We see political messages and references to popular culture.
Some of them are clearly jokes that have exited directly from the artist’s sub
conscience with very little intervention of logic. Mario Balotelli’s Revelry
features what looks like a Rastafarian girl with a bull terrier and a seal on her
back. “I want Balotelli to buy it” he tells me. Maybe, just maybe.
Head Of A British Commonwealth Soldier is a beautiful Picasso
inspired portrait of a soldier in primary colours. The veteran’s head is
haunted and spooked by everything that surrounds him, even a tactically placed
railway card – the tough journey back to civvy street?
Barefooted Athletes, Pride of Africa a richly blue
background with a jet black figure takes me back to the Miro retrospective at
the Tate in 2011. Adjani explains it thus: “when people want to become stars,
Olympic athletes for example, all they see is the bright stars, they don’t see
where they came from. They trained barefoot. A whole poem sits behind the
picture telling the politicians [in Africa] to piss off basically. Politicians
are intellectual gatecrashers. They do nothing to help the sports people in
Africa to become the stars we see. It is also a celebration of black people’s
endeavours. We make the best of something time and time again. Take Obama. How
does a man come from an African background, an enslaved people, and become
president? We have this resilience embedded in our DNA, it’s just some people
don’t know how to use it.”
Adjani Okpu-Egbe’s himself is remarkably resilient. There’s nothing he
can experience that’s going to keep him down. He’s discovered his latent talent
and it’s about to explode onto the art scene. Mario, if you’re reading this, in
your Cheshire mansion. I think your mansion could do with a splash of
Cameroonian-London colour.
'Community Man' his latest show is currently on at the Brick Box in Brixton until the 31st January.
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