Benedict Chukwukadibia Enwonwu M.B.E

(Nigerian, 1917-1994)

Ogolo in Motion

Footnotes

Provenance
A private collection, UK.

Painted between 1982 and 1991, Ogolo in Motion depicts the traditional Mmanwu masquerade that preoccupied Ben Enwonwu throughout his career. While masked performance featured in Enwonwu's drawings, sculptures, and paintings as early as 1940, his interest in the Ogolo was heightened in 1987 following the death of his eldest brother, Ike Francis Enwonwu. Masquerades play a significant role in the funerary rites of the Igbo people, including Enwonwu's family who were based in the city of Onitsha in south-east Nigeria. Ike Francis was one of the principal figures in Onitsha's indigenous government and sat on the king's council of high chiefs. He was consequently granted a grand burial and masquerade groups including the Agbogho Mmuo (maiden sprit) and Ogolo (male spirit) travelled to pay their respects. The act of masking allowed the dancers to occupy a liminal position as both performer and bridge to the spiritual realm, symbolising the complexity of human experience through their gestural performances. The masquerades left a marked impression on Enwonwu:

'I saw the Ogolo among a host of other masquerades during my brother's funeral, and it impressed me a lot. I did a lot of drawings of which I am painting one after the other. [In these works] I have focused on the Ogolo masked form [...] It is part of my recent important works [and] a steady flow of thought and development. I find it extremely beautiful' (Enwonwu quoted in S. Ogbechie, 2008: p. 198).

This 'steady flow' of artistic production took place between 1988 and 1994. During this mature phase of the artist's career, Enwonwu produced over fifty drawings, paintings, and sculptures on the theme of the masquerade with a particular focus on the Ogolo. He returned with renewed vigour to complete earlier unfinished depictions of the masked performance, including the present work which was created over a period of nine years. While the artist attributes his renewed interest in the Ogolo to the death of his brother, S. Ogbechie suggests that Enwonwu's preoccupation with the spiritual manifestation of male virility might also have allowed the artist to confront his own mortality during the period of illness he endured before his death in 1994.

The Ogolo masquerade is typically accompanied by drums that structure the repeated motions of the dancers that build into an explosive performance of athleticism. In Ogolo in Motion, Enwonwu captures three masked figures mid-performance: they crouch low to the ground with bent knees and arms curved away from their bodies. The gestural dynamism of the ritualistic dance is echoed in Enwonwu's handling of pigment. The thinned oil paint drips in fluid tracks down the lower portion of the canvas, while passages of multitoned blues and earthy yellows bleed into one another, echoing earlier depictions of the subject executed in gouache and watercolour. The masks worn by the three figures are not illustrated in the stark white typical of the Ogolo but are instead tinted blue to correspond with the overall scheme of the painting. Similarly, while Enownwu gestures to the conventional colour of the applique costumes with spare strokes of yellow pigment, he executes much of the Uli-inspired patterned fabric in blues and greys. The conical headdress of the central figure is depicted in striking detail using fiery red, zingy yellow, and cobalt blue, focalising the performer through colour and composition.

Recognising the self-conscious employment of Western painterly technique in his depictions of Mmanwu performance, Enwonwu notes, '[t]he subject of masquerade is African. The dance is African. I am using the technical Western rendering to bring out its colour, its tonal values. Its vibrancy, and its universal appeal'. He understood this body of work to be an urgent contribution to the development of a postcolonial modernist aesthetic in Nigeria following the country's independence in 1960. Enwownu's pursuit of the masquerade theme can further be situated within his career-long engagement with the relationship between dance and artistic expression as also evidenced in the lyrical lines of stylized female figures in his Negritude series, and in his illustrations of popular dance styles in his Africa Dances series (executed predominantly in the 1970s). Ogolo in Motion can thus be seen as a product of the personal, political, and artistic concerns that preoccupied Enwonwu in the later years of his artistic career.

Bibliography
Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, Ben Enwonwu: The Making of an African Modernist (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2008).