The novel The Famished Road (1991) by Ben Okri tells the story of Azaro, the book’s narrator. He is an abiku, a spirit child in the Yoruba tradition of Nigeria who exists between life and death. He grows up in a violent, chaotic society and is constantly drawn toward the land of the dead, the spiritual world. Yet he chooses to remain on earth. Artist Eniwaye Oluwaseyi is inspired by stories like The Famished Road. They help him create a world on canvas in which beauty and violence, dream and reality exist side by side.

Four men in the moonlight

In the painting Fading Moon (2024), we see four men standing in the moonlight. One of them is lifted up by the legs by another, his arms hanging wide in the air, like an inverted crucifix. The fourth figure does not have black skin but green. He appears more like a silhouette without details, looking at the scene with a certain detachment. Eniwaye explains that this painting is not only inspired by the books of Okri, but also contains references to old masters such as Titian (1488–1576) and Poussin (1594–1665). Poussin often depicted small groups of people in his paintings as part of the composition, in order to bring movement into the scene. He showed these people committing acts of violence against each other, yet managed to add religious and magical elements to those same compositions. Titian, on the other hand, focused more closely on the human body; he captured faces and bodies flawlessly and depicted human drama like no other.

In Fading Moon one can discern an interesting mix of techniques. The three Black men, for instance, are painted as realistically as possible. Their skin shines in the moonlight, and their muscular bodies are rich in detail. The sky around the moon, by contrast, is painted roughly and abstractly, like a large white milky stain dripping across the canvas. Elsewhere in the composition, details are alternated with rough brushstrokes or lines. It seems to be Eniwaye’s way of depicting dream and reality side by side: on the one hand, observing reality with precision, while at the same time giving shape to the invisible and the intangible.

Eniwaye presents two series of paintings at the Villa. Fading Moon belongs to the series inspired by the stories of Ben Okri, combined with references to Titian and Poussin. In those stories and images he found moments that seem frozen in time, where beauty and violence exist alongside each other. He wanted to translate that atmosphere into his own world: figures rooted in recognizable landscapes, yet surrounded by skies, trees and details that seem to belong to another reality. As he puts it himself: “The brutal act of becoming — not only as an artist, but also as an individual in an unfamiliar territory.”

A socket on the wall

The second series of paintings is rooted in quiet scenes: people he knows, rooms he has been in, the silence of a moment as it unfolds. Here, space does not always obey a single reality. Colors shift, details fade, and some parts remain unfinished. “This fracture between realistic-looking sections of the painting and unfinished, vague details allows the ordinary to transition into something stranger, something deeper,” Eniwaye explains.

The painting Nestled Dream belongs to this second series. Two men are depicted in a somewhat worn room. They look straight at the viewer. Again, the bodies are rendered in great detail, as in the faces, which are painted with intensity. Even the wall socket on the left stands out from the canvas. Other parts are vaguer, such as the red trousers of one of the men, which blur into dripping red stains. A section of the wall also shows drips running down to the floor. The silence Eniwaye seeks to capture in this series clearly emerges in this work. Time seems to stand still. The men are present in that room, but what are they doing? In fact, nothing is happening. One sits, the other stands. They look ahead, but there is little else to read into the scene. Are they waiting? The fact that these questions remain unanswered shows that Eniwaye is not concerned with action, but with sketching a world where intention is absent. The men want nothing, do nothing, expect nothing, but are simply there with their bodies in that room. However realistic some parts of the canvas are painted, this state of being does not occur in the “real” world. We cannot stop time; we always carry intentions. So here too, Eniwaye plays with magical influences.

Different spaces

He says himself that he has always been interested in the concept of space: “Both physical and psychological space.” They are physical rooms Eniwaye has actually been in, but which on canvas have been transformed into unreal places. And they are also psychic spaces depicted, far removed from reality, in which a person can wander. “I have always been interested in spaces, especially for Africans. I create ethereal or psychological spaces in which the Black body truly exists and is not bound by rules or prescriptions. I want the viewers to ask questions and understand what this space is about. What makes it necessary for a Black body to be in such a space? Why can it not simply exist in a real space?”[1]

At Villa, his work on the Albino community in his native Nigeria is also on view. The idea arose after he saw an interview with artist Kerry James Marshall. In that interview, Eniwaye recalls, “Marshall spoke about his museum visits, where he only saw paintings of white people — from the Renaissance to the contemporary era.” This made him reflect on his own place as an artist, still living and working in Nigeria at the time. “I really began to look within my own community, at minorities who are underrepresented, and I read about their marginalization,” he explains. In this way he encountered the plight of people with albinism in Sub-Saharan Africa. “That touched me deeply.”[2]

In the presentation, Eniwaye shows not only paintings, but also shelves with books on them. To name a few: Orlando by Virginia Woolf, Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami, I’m Not Your Negro and Another Country by James Baldwin. These are, like the novels of Ben Okri, books from which he draws inspiration. Not from the internet, not only from memory, but from stories he reads, written by others. The choice of these books encapsulates the themes of his work. It is the very subject that also shapes Azaro’s life in The Famished Road: the thin line between the mythical and the everyday (harsh) reality. Eniwaye wants to show that this line runs through all our lives: “in a glance, a gesture, and in the political tension of existence.”

[1] https://www.paleisamsterdam.nl/media/documents/PAL24-1027_catalogus_KP25_190X245_web_DEF.pdf

[2] https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/eniwaye-oluwaseyi-the-politics-of-shared-spaces-art-141220