An artistic pursuit of knowledge

The African Artists Foundation AAF, adopting the theme ‘In Pursuit of Knowledge’, featured three artists: Gerald Chukwuma, Emmanuel Dudu, and Ike Francis in an exhibition which ran from June 26 to 29.

The sculptor, Gerald Chukwuma, graduated in 2003 with a first class honours from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He has participated in 12 group exhibitions and has won several awards. His works adorn many public and private places within Nigeria.

Chukwuma, on creativity, says: “An artist stops being creative when the child in him grows.” Although there is playfulness in his approach to serious issues, Chukwuma, who has an intrinsic need to recycle and regenerate, is as interested in the process of making, as he is in the end product, “I chisel the images by hand; I like the hardship and time it takes. Nothing good comes without hardship.”

The paint artist, Dudu Emmanuel, recently added a Bachelors degree in visual art to his 1999 HND from the Auchi Art School. Emmanuel paints mostly in figures which he renders using pastel, oil, Acrylics, and watercolours.

The artist, who has participated in about 21 exhibitions, has a couple of awards to his name; he was the first prize winner of the ‘Spain through Nigerian Eyes’ competition organised in 2006 by the Spanish Embassy in Nigeria.

He is preoccupied with capturing reality as reflected by his subject choices who are often simple, rural, ground level people who Emmanuel, much like a photographer, has zoomed in on to present an objective view. “It is the essence of art that a message is communicated. I am inspired by the streets, common everyday people. The truth is almost 80% of Nigerians live like this so I must reflect this honesty.”

The Port Harcourt-based artist, Ike Francis, whose work covers painting on different surfaces, installations and drawings believes that “colour is a conveyor of feelings and it also possesses mental sound which is different from articulate sound, hence, such concepts as ut Pictora Poesis or Muta Poesis suffixes as variant forms of visual poetry.”

Francis says, “it is plausible to harness the intrinsic communicative qualities of colour and cause it to give mental voice of poetic essence from written form to its visual cognate form.” He is described as an artist-poet because of his hybridization of the text and the visual form into what he calls ‘plastic poetry’.

Emmanuel Dudu, Ike Francis, and Gerald Chukwuma in this exhibition showed that they share a common purpose to highlight the mental poverty prevalent in the Nigerian society today.

The African Artists foundation AAF is the resident artistic organization at Lagos Civic Centre located on Ozumba Mbadiwe Road, Victoria Island, Lagos. Committed to the promotion of African arts and artists, the charitable organisation is headquartered at 54 Raymond Njoku Street, Ikoyi, Lagos.