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Poetics of Portfolio by ike Ude lke t'de, , % m aIf, 1992,acrylic, fIbcr, wire me&, rnqner, crayon, paper on wood, :7" x 22" Colicccion of Kent and Heidi Einenan, Ncw York ne inevitably feels constrained when addressing the particularities, the subtleties, and the fugitive aspects of any artwork through description For description can only yield to the tactile or visual sensation of a material via its visible and measurable properties, and never enough to the inner core of the artwork Therein lies the major limitation of such a system of apprehension Vanishing and minimal, to the point of diffidence, Ike Ude's art refuses knowledge through such a system Dematerialized, they exhibit many of the qualities of the ephemeral - at once elusive and palpable, illusionary and real, mundane and profound They run the paradoxical gamut Ude's work subsists on the analogical, a euphemism that might appear more like a lack of stance (given that present critical atmosphere demands such thickly drawn lines ) Addressing the stringency of such critical demands Ike for the most part remains non-committal, questioning rhetorically " how can I possibly describe through an aesthetic object things that give me pleasure, that are meaningful to my life? Things such as the smell of a particular fragrance, the quality of certain lights It is nearly impossible for me to state them so clearly on the surface of a painting , yet I try through my usage of color and forms to approximate those emotions, the spirits that live in them " It is this elusiveness, this anti-stance (which is not necessarily anti-form) that points one towards an understanding of this artist's ouevre Fluid and everchanging, pulled by forces that attempt to foreground them in concreteness, Ude's work defies attempts to define the constitution of its shape, form, and content In this sense it is a conundrum; an undecideable - hence provisional - until new meaning usurps all prior assumptions And in so far as its materiality is at odds with our efforts to capture its fall from permanence , still it seeks points of entry into the immobility of our social grounding about arts ultimate meaning, precisely at the point they seem to be vanishing Ude's work deploys and plays with space It gives one the feeling of a hoped-for-transcendance His work seduces It traffics in veils and the sublime; in dispersal and displacement ; in literalness and suggestiveness H e states that his concerns deal with the "poetics of space as foreground and background, exterior and interior; a source, a window into the immaterial, but also to invoke a presence", to make the felt immanent, to summon the spirit from its fringe abode Therefore, what's on the surface of these constructionslpaintings (magnets, paper, wire mesh, cork, thread, felt etc ) - built almost like a bricoleur - is just as important as what lies beneath the clouds of thinly layered color and fragile markings on the ground of each piece The found objects with which the environments of these sculptural collages are transformed rests uneasily on their grounds in a kind of antipodean shared relationship At once open and occluded to entry, the works are ruminative in the sense that they reorientate the viewer's gaze towards participation in the process of their making One inevitably feels the urge to literally take on this invitation to be a participant by thinking up other materials that might seem appropriate to the resolution of the works This attitude embodied in much of Ude's work - from the earlier art brut inspired works of the eighties to his inythopoeic sculptures such as " Cure for A Certain Myopia" exhibited at Barney's New York, to his Uli inspired pictograms places them squarely within the realm of the performative The works are not just aesthetic objects, nor are they reified bodies of knowledge They are theatres of indeterminate existences and forms: casual and profound, manufactured and found; all of them pilfered from the ordinariness of the everyday Still Ude's work is also involved in historicizing certain elements of his Igbo background and identity Though he is not tied directly or indirectly to the material formalism of recent research efforts into the symbolic...

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