Odili Donald Odita has lived in the United States virtually all his life. Besides being an artist, Odita is also a critic who has written for publications such as Flash Art and NKA, and a professor who, from the beginning of September 2006, will be teaching painting at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. In 2004 Odita was the recipient of a grant from the Thami Mnyele Foundation, and he currently serves on the board of Art Omi in upstate New York after undertaking a residency there in 1998.

This year Odita is scheduled to participate in the inaugural Luanda triennial. His work can be seen on Ordering and Seduction at Haus Konstruktiv in Zurich until August 2006; some recent exhibitions include the 2004 Dakar biennale; A Fiction of Authenticity: Contemporary Africa Abroad at the Contemporary Art Museum, St Louis (2003); Black President: The Art and Legacy of Fela Anikulapo Kuti at the New Museum, New York (2003); and Material and Matter at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2000). Odita has previously shown in South Africa with a public art installation (a billboard and bus shelter posters) in Johannesburg exhibited as part of the Projects section of the second Johannesburg Biennale in 1997.

Odita has evolved a distinctive style of painting that explores the subtleties of colour, shape and form by creating fields of tilting and angular horizontal bars of flat and contrasting colour. The artist carefully articulates the thoughts and intentions that inform his imagery in his statement below:

The End, and the Beginning
The original inspiration for the paintings I make today came from my intellectual rumination and fascination for television, wallpaper, the computer and all they hold in relation to the idea of painting. I was interested in TV as an evocative, subliminal, manipulative, cultural brainwashing device; in how wallpaper as a visual sign mimicked the effects and seemed to be the conceptual endgame for high-modernist painting; and in the computer for its phenomena involving space which is created in particular through digital code. I began making these specific paintings in 1991 and stopped making them in 1993. At that time, I wanted to focus more on the issue of subject matter that was driving me, and speak more to the point of issues that addressed ‘blackness,’ ie, blackness as an object, and objecthood. I began making work that addressed these points through multi-media based installations and digitally manipulated images. I began to seriously make paintings again in 1998, and only because I never really lost full sight of them – I only needed time to better understand painting, and my relationship to painting. Also, I needed time to understand that more can be said through them than only expressing a basic reaction to the negative side of modernism and modernity that emptied artwork of meaning, and effected a complete denial of cultures that exist outside its model.

The W/hole of Modernity
The patterning of the stripes in my paintings began as a reference to a state of being. I saw them as voices, thoughts, sights, ideas, and the space of people – all different yet coming together to create a community within the frame of the canvas. This union sometimes clashes, sometimes harmonises, and often does a lot of both. In the incessant affirmation of the canvas’ edge, and through my painting’s horizontality and verticality, I am also trying to imply ‘a beyond’, as in what might exist outside this centre stage, or centre space. For me, modernism has always been specifically concerned with a reality inside the frame – one frame; I want to play with what could possibly exist outside of this in the ever expanding/decreasing ‘zips’ that work to imply space and movement from and beyond the canvas edge.

Third Colour – Third Space
The organisation and patterning in the paintings are of my own design. I am interested in the painting’s potential, and I am continuing to explore its metaphoric ability to address the human condition through pattern, structure and design, as well as its possibility to trigger memory through colour. The colours are personal: they reflect the collection of visions from my travels locally and globally. This is also one of the hardest aspects of my work as I try to derive the colours intuitively, hand-mixing and co-ordinating them along the way. In my process, I cannot make a colour twice – it can only appear to be the same. This aspect is important to me as it highlights the specificity of differences that exist in the world of people and things. My commitment to painting has come with a growing understanding of quality and beauty that can be found through painting, and of how beauty, when fully realised, can communicate consciousness.

I am indebted to my past work within the field of photo-based conceptualism. Working with and through photographic imagery allowed me the opportunity to delve deep into issues of identity, and to better understand the world in which I live. It allowed me the chance to see and speak about my innermost concerns in the most graphic of contexts. It also opened the door for me to explore and expand upon my drawing where I can speak more specifically and metaphorically about the condition of the African Body in all its social and cultural contexts. Through this process of work, I was able to come back to painting with openness to the promise of defining possibility within a world of multiple and transmutable realities.

Here Is Now
At this time, I am still interested in how my paintings can look like the scrambled reception from a television set, a disconnect from recognisable imagery, and yet giving one the sense of a familiarity located deep within one’s own culture. In our overly mediated reality, I am all too aware of television and its doctored way of transmitting the information we consume on a minute-by-minute basis – a type of socio/cultural information that can successfully influence us in the ways that we think, act, see and feel within our environment. It is my intent to mimic this format through painting, but in my way, I want to participate in a type of communication that speaks for Africa. African culture is so interregnal to Western culture, and yet the continent continues to exist as a region denigrated in the mind of the world. I wish to rechannel the negative thinking around Africa, speak from the centre of its present beauty, and expand upon what I know and understand about the history of this wonderful and mysterious place.

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