Landscape Mode is Edozie Anedu’s first foray into what he describes as
“imaginative cityscape paintings”. Rather than a complete departure from his
figurative works, which he has variously exhibited at several group shows and his
first solo show in 2019, Landscape Mode repurposes the hallmarks of colour, line
and form in Anedu’s paintings into critiques of urbanisation in Lagos.
Setting aside illustrations of stick figures that are inheritances of Michel Basquait,
Anedu has adapted his spirited colour palette onto representations of cramped
buildings that suggest poor urban planning. If this blame is heaved on bad
governance and limited foresights, Anedu’s landscapes become a celebration of
ingenuity by low income dwellers against the odds of their socio-economic
status.
The interpretations may be multiple but the artist’s aim is simple and clear: “I
want to play on the genre of landscape painting”. So, gone is the law of
perspective that is canonical to the genre. Anedu’s clusters of buildings are
brought forward to fill the frame, as is the moon or sun and skylines.
A great deal of colour action takes place in Anedu’s paintings. The most obvious
are between the few colours that make up the open skies and numerous shades
and tints that distinguish the cramped buildings. In “Victoria’s Redemption”, the
dominating bright red sky intensifies the yellows and blues that reoccur on the
houses below it. But the grey and blue skies in “August” mutes the displacements
of yellows, green teals and blacks.
The confluence of colours in Landscape Mode are as dependent on the artist’s
colour action as they are on the viewer’s own pattern of reading. Only after the
first set of viewing, and once accustomed to the whites and yellows in
“Saturday”, did the placements of blue and green teal emerge into this writer’s
perception of the colour field.Additional intrigue is wrought by the wobbly lines that characterise the huddled
box-shapes that are Anedu’s drawings of Lagos buildings.
Key to Landscape Mode is the very act of drawing, as elemental as it is essential.
A slight distinction between the adjectives is necessary to emphasise the former’s
importance to Anedu’s medium and world creation which are drawn from bad
handwritings and rough workings in notebooks. The latter is called upon to
explain the artist’s self-examination and self-esteem: “drawing always shows how
insecure or how bold I am. My imperfect drawings are actually beautiful if you
can see it”.
Anedu may credit his experiments with colourfields to the Latvian-American Mark
Rothko’s rectangular blocks but his so-called multiforms outscale the miniforms
(as we shall now call them) which the Nigerian artist has taken to. Shrink these
miniforms of a cityscape and Anedu comes closer to the near pointillism of
Ablade Glover who has long committed to the “constant exploration of that idea
even if the changes are slight”
The Ghanaian master’s continued exploration of landscapes has defined his
output and has drawn criticisms of copying-self. But he maintains that markets,
like Anedu’s cities, have such a variety of moods that change day by day, hour by
hour: “it could be buoyant, depressed, energetic, lethargic yet looking almost the
same’. This new resonance with Glover offers exciting possibilities of where
Anedu’s inherited palette Basquait and adoration of Rothko could lead.
Taking the artist’s aim to “play on” the genre of landscape painting into account,
Landscape Mode seem mainly interested in the aesthetic value of buildings and
vistas, especially when rendered in colours that abstract them from their true
and real life versions. Anedu does not agree: “the point for me is creating the
consciousness of the present. I want to make people more conscious of the
elements around them. That’s a way to come out of the mind and come to reality,
come to the present”.Anedu accepts that these manifestations of busy lives — zooming cars and
rumbling generators or self-absorption in relation to phones and the internets —
may be necessary and amped up in big cities, his primary aim is to “focus on the
ordinary things that we can see”.
The Lagos megalopolis continues to baffle and fascinate artists to no end.
Nigeria’s most populous city defies the logic of urban planning long established in
the western world and demands new definitions of what is a modern metropolis.
The concept of residential or business spaces in Lagos are constantly renegotiated
to accommodate a population of 20 million people and counting.