“Forever People”

By Gean Moreno

      Odili Donald Odita’s paintings are sites of contagion, territories where codes infect one another. A Nolandesque color band cross-fades into a strip of African textile; a fractal field becomes a desert landscape; the patterned skin of a soccer ball morphs into a chart of skin hues. This occurs at other levels as well: geometry doubles as a site where cultural identity is marked; the trope of self-referentiality is occupied by geopolitical narratives. For Odili, painting doesn’t exist independent from the particular contexts—economic, social, political, and cultural—from which it arises. And these contexts always register in the work. So rather than run interference on this process of registration, Odili opens the channels for it by treating painting as a space where multiple discursive lines always overlap.

      Incorporating the visual motif of the soccer ball, Odili recognizes the African body through a series of metaphorical deployments of color as skin, skin as landscape, and landscape as the connective tissue between bodies enduring the struggles at home and bodies enduring displacement and Diaspora. Odili’s powder pigments, applied directly to the wall, read as the epidermal pigments that have accumulated so much meaning in our televisual economies of information distribution. A black body—whether speeding down the sidelines, celebrating a goal, or running down a city street, embroiled in a more ambiguous and sinister scenario—is a social body, always emitting a series of predetermined signals, even as it challenges the obstacles that channel interpretation. Relying on soccer’s redemptive narratives, Odili negotiates a space in which the complicated exchange between the inner dimensions and the imposed narratives of the African body is teased out into the open.

Gean Moreno is an artist and writer based in Miami.