Abe Odedina’s new solo show I’m a Believer crystallises something that has infused his practice since its earliest days. Via his irrepressible interest in stories and the way they help us make sense of the world, Odedina unites societal myths and daily minutiae under one thesis: fact and fiction aren’t as different as we might think, and all it takes to transform one into the other is belief.
As a statement, the show’s title operates a double bind – after all, declaring belief in something acknowledges its arbitrary limits; it allows for the possibility of disbelieving, framing belief as a choice rather than something inevitable. It’s a worldview that offers enormous manoeuvrability, positioning grand narratives and hearsay alike in one arena, to subscribe to or discard as the case may be. Most importantly of all, it figures Odedina in a rich context – artist as creator of stories, not just an absorber of them.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Odedina revels in both roles. Replete with mini-miracles as well as bona fide supernatural occurrences, his tableaus testify to the magic of lives large and small alike. Rendered in his characteristic style, always privileging symbolic legibility, his paintings wrangle high and low into a single plane (plywood, acrylic), underplaying gods or overstating anecdotes depending on which angle you’re looking from.
That pleasurable tension is evident in Odedina’s playful titles – The girl next door, for instance, takes the point of view of a little boy. Standing next to a bike in his garden, he looks over his fence at the titular girl springing past on a cheetah, bridled and saddled as it lopes across the dreamy landscape. Of course, the proposition is magical – a child riding a beast! – but also totally familiar, almost (paradoxically) tedious; echoes of keeping up with the Joneses, or the every-child refrain of it’s not fair, why can’t I have one too? ring out as the boy looks on.
Among Odedina’s audience, almost everyone will recognise his ‘girl next door’ – that is, a baffling, enviable peer – as a figure from their own life. While it’s a fair assumption that none of those figures will have regularly travelled by cheetah, the feeling invoked by the painting – of looking and longing, physical proximity versus the distance of desire – is totally accessible. Such is the sleight of hand at the core of many of Odedina’s most affecting works: whichever character she identifies with, the viewer finds herself projected to the heart of an objectively magical scenario with unthinking familiarity.
The sense of something uncanny – that is, familiar and unfamiliar at the same time – runs through Odedina’s practice like a river. But while the uncanny generally brings with it some inference of unsettledness or dread, Odedina’s strain is altogether more playful – off-kilter, sure, but on track in an intuitive way. In Soft power, a man with a cheetah’s head and skin clutches a white rabbit to his torso. Against his white shirt and trousers, as well as a white curtain behind, the rabbit inhabits a tonally coherent scene even if its symbolic meaning is unclear. Is this a man or an animal? Is the rabbit a trick, a pet, or a meal? Have I seen this circus performer before?
Odedina is as enthusiastic as any viewer in his pursuit of answers to such questions; his reluctance to dispense definitive lore for the worlds he creates does not come from a desire to mystify, rather a preference for expansiveness over linearity. Like the stories that inspire his practice, Odedina’s paintings are tools of translation – feelings into images and back again – but they are also objects in their own right, descriptive of their own logic and universe. As narrative as they are visual, Odedina’s paintings are made to be read; like any good book, they combine clarity with ambiguity. Crucially, they must ‘work’ on their own terms, that is, without any need for exposition.
Drawing on religious traditions as well as pop culture – like The Monkees’ 1966 song that shares the show’s name – I’m a Believer locates the spark that powers existing narratives while also foregrounding the role of belief in contemporary art as a whole. Stepping into a gallery or a temple involves the belief that the objects inside will convey something transcendent, change us in some way; having located that symbolic overlap, Odedina revels in it. How about these objects, these images? he seems to say. I’m a believer – and in walking through the gallery doors, so are you.
