Plinth

In terms of my work, I try to make ambiguity concrete. In exploring ideas, I want to make them clear – to make the ambiguity clear rather than represent ambiguity. My work is very diagrammatic in many respects, because I abstract to a point where it’s just about bearable. The figures are human, but they’re not like anyone that you know.

Equally, they’re not all the same person. They’re not avatars.

I hope not. They tell me what they are! I begin with an idea, and if it’s a good one I start painting. All the changes happen in the painting, including covering something and starting again. It’s important that it has all those layers of energy. I paint on plywood, which gives you a bit of texture but it’s also pretty indifferent to my efforts. It’s used for building sites, and it doesn’t give a toss. Canvas, on the other hand, wants to talk about art – to be stretched like this and not like that…

Canvas is quite a loaded material, isn’t it?

It carries the whole weight of ‘art’. The canon! The Renaissance! And painting on board goes back to a much older tradition, frescos and religious panels for altars. Canvas is a modern material, which is wonderful for a different thing. I’m asking different things of my surface, and I’m very interested in composition. I like the idea of exerting a certain will on the paint; the process doesn’t have to be so lofty. I’m very suspicious of the idea of the artist as this other category of being – auteur, conduit. The artists replaced the saints, whose bones had magical powers…

I was thinking of getting another studio, but I don’t want to be detached from the house. I like this place’s context. We make stuff in this house: it has an energy which you don’t get in a shiny white cube. I’m trying to develop a language which allows me to ask the questions I want to ask, and I realise more and more that that’s what my practice is about. I try to rely on body language, gesture – the things that we read every day. We’re programmed that way: we only speak to a fraction of the people that we see and so, of course, we have to draw judgements. Some are right, and some aren’t – and some will save our lives! He looks like a bad man, and I need to be on the other side of the road. Is that a nice person really, in spite of the smile? I want to court that ambiguity. The paintings I make come to life in that territory between my intention and your interpretation. The last thing I’m asking you to do is to invest in my ‘amazing feelings’ – this is not autobiography.

Can you talk me through those ideas via this work [Soft Landing]?

Sure. This is called Soft Landing, and her expression is everything. It’s vital, all those little indications which mean a ninety-year-old man and a nine-year-old girl can both read it – but equally, it’s not something which is set. On the one hand it’s very obvious, but this world [in the painting] – which is very stark, like an abbreviation of the real world – has references which are recognisable. Somebody is poised, and you might relate to that – will you jump or not jump? Will you climb the tree? How high is the tree? Anybody who looks at that will have their own way into it, I hope, because it’s not a narrative that you can read wrong. Sometimes I much prefer other people’s interpretations of my own pieces! And I’m as interested in the bits which aren’t part of the painting as what is.

And will Soft Landing feature in your new show, Birds of Paradise?

Yes. The show has come from this idea of the two mysteries which we’re all caught between: we don’t know what came before, and we don’t know what’s coming after. In most cultures there’s an idea of paradise – something which you might earn by behaving in a certain way. This is the arena; and then, people love birds of paradise. They’re as varied as you could hope for – black, with little feathers, red and green... When they start their mating dance, you think: this is how we should be. I’m sure of it; it’s about self-expression. A tiger’s tigeritude is perfect, for instance, and so you can say that about nature more widely, but these birds have a special role – and not just in European thinking. Across cultures, birds are often seen as emissaries. They can do this fundamental thing, this flying between two realms... We can’t fly! When the explorers that first went to the pacific islands saw the birds there, they thought they’d found the phoenix. A bird that makes you think a you’ve found a myth must be special… For me, the birds of paradise have become a bit of a collective noun for how we ought to be – we hit that sweet spot many times in our lives, but it can be so fleeting. Paradise can give us a daily respite, an idea of another thing that might happen – maybe in the sun somewhere. We invest in moments of that special place, or that absence which signifies it; paradise is lost and regained, too. Perhaps, when we get there, we’ll find that we can all be ourselves.

And the title of the exhibition infers the same name for its cast of characters – are the figures which populate your painting ‘birds of paradise’ themselves?

Well, it’s not utopian where they exist. It’s more a question of, how do we get to that exalted space? It’s certainly not a place without responsibility – rather, a place of values. In particular, I’m thinking a lot about how we’re treating the world. I’ve started painting landscapes – portraits of the planet, if you like. This is Babel [see image above], which seems a neat metaphor for knowledge and what you can do with it. How do we apply that old story to the 21st century? I don’t think we’re using much of the knowledge we’re receiving at the moment – or if we are, it’s to tear each other apart…

And how much are you thinking about the socio-political context when you’re painting?

I work with the radio on. I don’t want the paintings to be whimsical. If you create a magic world, what do they breathe? If it’s abstracted, it’s important that it doesn’t feel like anywhere you’ve been before but I do want to keep the sense of: tree, fence, sky, big world. What is the character doing, in the landscape? I don’t want to be burdened with a room, I want to zoom straight in to where the incantations mean something. I’m fascinated by daily life, and I don’t want [my painting] to get too hysterical. The work can’t be overly didactic – but while it needs some mystery, it has to be legible too. I want you to feel that you can engage with, interrogate, walk away from one of my paintings. It’s like a climbing wall – no good if you don’t have hand holds! But, however firm the images are, their genesis is very fluid. These blank boards torment me – that awful question, what to paint?

And what’s the answer?

I like the idea of being a working artist, like a builder or a cleaner; a doctor. I paint fast and I paint a lot, but I think of it like practice. I don’t care if it’s good or bad, because it’s painting. I scrap something I did a week ago because I’ve become a better painter in the interim. When I paint objects, it’s because we know what they can do – we’ve invested them with powers. We know what a ladder can do, what a knife can do, what lipstick can do. My painting is figurative – Modernism needed to happen, and we can look back at it without getting stuck there. I’m from Nigeria so I didn’t inherit the same anxieties about it – but equally, I don’t want to feel like I have to ‘sign up’ to show that I’m not feeble minded, or subscribe to the idea that abstraction is the only way forward. That movement was like a teenager rebelling because the world had been turned upside down – but now it’s been turned upside down in a different way.

And this is your second show at Copeland Gallery, because the first was in 2016 – The Year It All Went Wrong…!

You know, I have gone from being very worried, like everyone else, to understanding that it’s just a performance – some kind of amateur performance, which has gone terribly wrong… I don’t know that being anxious will help, because that presupposes that there’s something rational going on behind the scenes. That being said, we’re not going to get by without getting involved anymore. ‘Racism’s over, we’re getting there, feminism’s sorted’ – woah, those ideas were premature! That kind of victory is not in the bag, by any means. The collective effort of the last few years have led to Trump – and people implore, ‘how did this happen?!’ Well, it happened on our watch. I’m not separating myself, but it’s not helpful to throw our hands up in synthetic outrage either. In short, I don’t want to be in a reverie when I paint – the worlds I create are influenced by this one. I hope the landscapes have an eeriness, a starkness. I hope that comes out in spite of, or because of, the bright colours. I want to tie them together and balance that with the discordance we find all around us.

Maybe the word for that unsettling aspect [of your work] is uncanny – almost right but not quite. Like, that’s a tree [in the painting], but it’s not like the tree out the window. Perhaps that accounts for the eeriness.

That’s right. I can’t switch off that call from the landscape because it’s becoming one of my primary characters. I’ll show you… This is Barking Up the Wrong Tree [see image below]. We do engage with the earth in a very bloody way, and it has consequences. Here, I wanted to show jeopardy, and a corpse. It’s a portrait – of a slice of earth, of the main protagonist we are acting upon. Meanwhile, I’m raiding our popular mythology – I’ve just decided that it’s mine to do what I want with! – but I do try to invent my own symbols. It’s important that they can either be understood directly, or that most reasonable people can feel their way towards their meaning. I’m not working with esoteric knowledge, which can be great but also dreadfully limited – if a work comes to require a glossary, I think it’s failed.

Speaking of symbols, I want to ask you about your tattoos!

Well, they’re central to this exhibition in many ways – and one painting [Birds of Paradise - see main image, top], which depicts tattooing, has leant its name to the show. When we came to London, I had a couple of tattoos before I realised that I wanted to be a proper illustrated man. They weren’t as popular as they are now, more than 20 years ago – they carried a lot of counter-cultural baggage, and worse! I remember people moving away, crossing the road, thinking: You must be bad, you have no respect for our shared values, you’re sitting there displaying your mutilated body and you don’t care. If you don’t care about yourself, what else don’t you care about? Skin is political, and so public skin is very political. [By having tattooed skin] you’re partaking in a social activity, whether you want to or not. I was an architect at the time, and here I am about to give a big presentation using my tattooed hands! But I’d found this small group of people – some very heavily modified – and I loved their sense of ownership over their own bodies. They saw the body as plastic, and tattooing as a celebration rather than mutilation. I found a tattooist called Duncan, who I really liked. He turned out to be the intern at the parlour, but I picked him out because I liked how he’d tattooed his own body. I liked his aesthetic sensibility – almost nihilistic, completely free.

If you think that tattooing is mutilation, on some deep level, then it follows that you have to agonise and choose something very profound – your daughter’s name, your birthday or something like that. I mean, that’s fine, but you have to ask why you’re doing it in the first place; it’s not compulsory, and that anxiety is masking a fundamental conviction that it is a kind of desecration. Conversely, the people who say ‘whoops, I went to Amsterdam and woke up with a Tahitian dancing girl on my chest’ have a much healthier attitude! In practically every culture, we’ve been adorning our bodies for millennia – and by that I mean that it can’t matter that much. I love the freedom; those [traditional images and] objects, on bodies or in ceremonies, weren’t made with a museum in mind. They aren’t loaded with those preoccupations, and why should they be? I’m happy to look at anything – not uncritically, but I’m open. My tattoos are motifs, there to be read; I love conceptual art because meaning is central to it, but I don’t believe it’s all so different to figurative work. What art looks like, or where it lives, should never be settled – that’s all I ask.