Idowu Oluwaseun was born in Lagos in 1982 and currently lives in Houston, Texas. He studied initially at the School of Art, Design and Printing at the Yaba College of Technology in Lagos and then with Rita McBride at the Düsseldorf Art Academy.
His work conveys a magical, sometimes even mysterious atmosphere, although he is not a surrealist with a penchant for the magical, but rather a passionate realist with a predilection for detail. Working from his own photographs, he is not content to make the paintings look like photographs. Rather, he enhances their photographic effect, that strange "as if".
In fact, although their similarity to photographs is so striking, it is still evident that here the painter reproduces the painted photographs with mastery and subtlety, so that the images produced in the process can in the end be considered complete paintings. The painter virtually simulates the photograph perfectly, but at the same time deviates from the template. On the one hand, this has to do with his claim to verisimilitude. On the other hand, it has to do with the fact that he is concerned with representing a moment and not a longer period of time.
His paintings refer to a reality and do not create a fiction. By subtly oscillating between the two media, he thus awakens the paradoxical appearance that what is painted is photographed and real.
Precisely because of this, the moment captured by him acquires a meaning cut out of the indifferent flow of time. He highlights them through painting, using accents that are similarly accentuated in photography. All this forces us to ask ourselves involuntarily, why is this moment captured? What does it refer to and what does it contain? What meaning is attributed to what is shown? To begin with, his genre is portraits of people from his homeland, Nigeria, both men and women, all of them young. His way of portraying people is reminiscent of the portrait style of African photographers, especially Malian Seydou Keïta (1923-2001). Idowu invokes his work as a source of inspiration and, indeed, the parallels are striking. Keïta also had his models pose for the camera in his studio with their possessions or accessories, such as radios, watches or scooters. With him, they also wear African attire.
Idowu adopted this idea. However, unlike the people portrayed by Keïta, whose faces move us emotionally and allow us to intuit their psychological conditions and life situation, Idowu mainly shows bodies in all their beauty but without physiognomy. By concealing part or all of his models' heads with printed fabrics, so that only their noses and mouths are visible, he confers on them a protective anonymity against any questioning. To the extent that it blurs everything we usually associate with portraits, we can speak in a certain sense of an anti-portrait. No names are mentioned, no characteristics are listed. In this way, it is impossible to look behind the outward appearance.
In this way, we are prevented from forming a concrete image of the models. The absence of a face is the idea, to the extent that the reading of traces of a life in the faces is not simply relegated to the background, but limits are intentionally set to do so. According to Idowu, "the faces are consciously covered to protect the bearers of my message. And to show the extent to which the minority is faceless". This information about his intentions gives another perspective to his portraits of Yoruba, who pose as if for a photo shoot, but not with the intention of highlighting their individuality. He has something else in mind. In fact, with the help of the portraits, he directs our attention to the ignorance of the world public about his country, which is the most populous on the African continent. He himself sees in the potential of the mass of impoverished people, repressed by the political leaders of his homeland, a possible beacon of hope for humanity.
His concern is the way Nigerians are perceived both at home and among the diaspora in other nations, along with the hardships and uncertain living conditions of his compatriots - massively impoverished and threatened with assassination - who suffer greatly from the political circumstances. However, he has not created any image of the desperate everyday life of Nigerians. What do we see then? In front of us are two young men, on whom the light falls from the left in such a way that half of their naked bodies are illuminated and glowing, while the other half is gradually darkened. One wears blue overalls, the other red jeans and, in addition, a black suitcase. Their upper bodies are painted so precisely that we can see almost every pore of their skin, every sinew and every muscle. When the one with his face turned in our direction stands directly in front of us, on the one hand we are reminded of the dark chapter of slavery, when bodies were looked at with a magnifying glass and traded like commodities.
On the other hand, we have the impression that we are presented with people whose individuality and personality are consciously hidden from us. The confusing omission of the face can be understood as a critique of the lack of recognition and the contempt with which the world treats the culture and life of the Nigerian people. At the same time, the faces of the representation are omitted so as not to subject them to our gaze. A distance is erected as a safe zone, so to speak. As the heads are covered up to the neck, neither the eyes nor the nose, nor the mouth or the ears are visible. The sitters remain for us, the viewers, absolute mysteries that cannot be solved. The only indication that they are twins is that their bodies are similar and that they are holding hands. The colour and pattern of the scarves covering their heads are different, as a symbol that they are both on the threshold where their former lives are divided. This is not the only image of a pair of twins that Idowu has portrayed. His focus on twins has to do with the fact that Nigeria has the highest birth rate of fraternal twins in the world. They are supposed to be a gift from God and bring luck, they are treated with affection, love and respect and their birth is welcomed as a good omen. However, in pre-colonial times they were interpreted as a bad omen, drowned or left to die exposed and their mothers were often killed because they were suspected of having slept with two men.
Even today, Yoruba people in south-western Nigeria believe that twins have joint souls. If a twin brother dies, the surviving son receives a wooden figure at his side in which the second half of the soul is supposed to live. Dressed as the twin, the mother feeds it and takes it to market. The belief is that otherwise the living twin could not survive. Unlike the twin brothers, whose faces are hidden, the heads of the twin sisters painted by Idowu - their arms resting on an old radio and their hands gently touching - are not completely hidden. Our gaze falls on the area between their mouths and chins, especially their glossy lips. Their firm sensuality is further underlined by their billowing shirts. Both wear black tank tops over smooth skin, as well as black necklaces and monochrome hijabs that hide their hair, neck and ears, as usual, as well as their eyes. Their intimate bond is also evident in the fact that one of the sisters has placed her hand under the other's hip. There is a special reason why the radio, which suggests a deep and touching connection between the two women, appears as a prop not only here, but also in other images such as "Explicit Conten"t or "Mopelola". Idowu has spoken of its cultural significance in conversation.
"When I was growing up, my father played a lot of music that has stayed with me to this day. Because of its inherent power, radio became an object of respect. In my country, there hasn't been a military coup that wasn't first announced on government-controlled radio. I have always wondered how power, both good and bad, is inherent in this medium, as in the case of Rwandan businessman Félicien Kabuga, who used his radio station to trigger the genocide in Rwanda. But music is also a weapon of the future, as well as of progressives, and a giver of life. Great revolutionaries use music to convey positive messages. Like the saxophonist, bandleader and political activist Fela Anikulapo Kuti, who died in Lagos in 1997. He fought against colonial slavery with his Afro-Beat sound, which he himself described as "Colo mentality". In the same way, for example in the United States, when the Internet did not yet exist, the musicians LL Cool J or Run DMC communicated with their generation through the boombox.
From here, the painting "The Collector" opens up for us. In front of us is a young man, his head wrapped so tightly in a cloth that only his braided locks of hair are showing. Cross-legged, he is seated in a green armchair on a tiled floor, in red jeans and with his upper body bare. His left arm rests on the back of the seat and his right arm rests on a bedside table. On it is a record player and hanging behind it on the wall, instead of posters, are LPs and album covers by King Sunny Adé, who combined traditional and pop music, or Haruna Ishola who, forgoing Western instruments, quoted Yoruba proverbs and texts from the Koran in her songs. The cover of Fela Anikulapo Kuti with an iron chain around his neck appears on the ornamental window sunk into the bedside table as a discreet tribute. Fela Kuti's life illustrates that music can be the emancipatory loudspeaker for which Idowu shows his respect. In his texts, he criticises Africa's social systems deformed by colonisation and condemns Nigeria's dictatorial military regime.
In his album "Zombie", released in 1976, he criticised government soldiers as zombies. He posed a threat to the ruling class because of his popularity among the Nigerian population, his international recognition and the radical nature of his song lyrics. So in 1977, some 1,000 soldiers set fire to his recording studio in Kalakuta. Kuti survived with a basal skull fracture. However, his 77-year-old mother died of her injuries. In protest, Kuti had her coffin carried to Olusegun Obsanjo's presidential palace. In 1981, he released the album "Coffin for Head of State" and fled to Ghana with his band. The deeper we delve behind the ostensible surface of his paintings, the more evident it becomes that, with only a few references and props embedded as symbols in the images, Idowu alludes to events in Nigeria. In doing so, his engagement with the music is informed by the spirit of hope.