NOW ON
WHAT LIES WITHIN
By Jimmy Nwanne
16TH MAY - 10TH JUNE
Temple Muse introduces an ongoing salon series dedicated to art, conversation and contemporary African expression. The first edition, What Lies Within, features new works by artist Jimmy Nwanne exploring texture, emotion and the unseen language within material and form. This salon explores the relationship between life, identity and migration as portraiture or composition using materials like oil and charcoal.
"In my practice the piece of cardboard stuck on canvas around the ear is a metaphor for the artwork as a box that holds more than is seen, thus it has to be unpacked"
Curated by Temple Muse, this collection of artworks captures different emotional aspects of human experience; love and affection, ambition, desire, laughter, self-awareness etc. The artworks are presented in two different media; charcoal on aquarelle paper and acrylic on canvas.
The rendering reveals a sense of playfulness and order in both media. The idea of the two different media is to show the progression of an idea from a playful sketch on paper created using different materials like charcoal, foam, torn out cardboard pieces, glue etc. into a painting on canvas.
The intention of combining these different materials, whether as floating patches of shapes or as colours, is to achieve chaos and order, roughness and smoothness, in a manner that will appeal to the tactile sense. The floating piece of cardboard around the ear of the figures is mimicked in paint using acrylic on canvas. The cardboard box is a container used to convey items; hence, it has to be unpacked to reveal what it holds within.
Nwanne's use of a piece of cardboard stuck on canvas around the ear in his work is a reminder that the artwork could be unpacked also by listening. As a material the piece of cardboard adds shape, colour, texture and it provides a surface to draw on.
Jimmy Nwanne studied fine arts at the Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka Nigeria, with a major in painting. He has exhibited his works in Denmark, Germany and Nigeria. Nwanne’s works looks at the relationship between life, identity and migration. The freedom to make a composition, a portraiture, by rearranging the natural place of something into another, in order to communicate an idea is what is being explored. The different subjects and objects function as symbols or motifs that represent an idea and they are used to make associations to different aspects of life, the interplay between them almost suggests the feeling of overlap or cut and paste. How everything will come together to create a dialogue and evoke a feeling from the viewer is the object of search.