OSAHENYE KAINEBI:
SEVEN YEARS AFTER
Professor Yusuf Grillo
Some seven years ago, I visited
the humble studio of this ex- student of mine at Festac Town. It
was immediately obvious to me then that this was a young man (27
years old) who was sincere and determined, who had a vision and
recognised the immense difficulty along the path he had chosen to
realise his vision.
Looking at his recent works, I can
only congratulate him on "holding his course" undeterred and maturing
steadily in ideas and technique. He is, as he was 7 years ago, still
a painter of ideas in the expressionist style. He has however got
more confident, in some cases, daring.
He now paints very large canvases
in a way that seems to tell the canvas "you are not large enough".
His colours, in the true "expressionist" tradition are strong, pure
and eloquent.
Kainebi has never been an illustrative
artist per se. He is progressing further and further away from illustrative
art like a scientist in the process of distillation. Abstraction
is like distilling the essence out of a. jumble of visual images
and evidently, this is Kainebi's goal.
He has become more philosophical
too. His subjects are thought-provoking - like listening to a preacher
who is not afraid to drive home the bitter truth. His Before the
tempter came" is a very fascinating work.
The audacity of the tempter who
bursts into sacred grounds and the audacity of the tempted who rebels
against the awesome authority of her master find appropriate expression
in the audacity of the artist - in the inspired way he breaks up
the large space, the precarious way he balances void and form, lines
and colour.
Kainebi is trying out "collage"
on some of the canvases. It is more of "montage" in intention since
the pieces of paper assembled are not just shapes, colour and texture
but they, in themselves, carry verbal messages. This is a new direction
the progress of which I intend to watch.
Kainebi has left the Festac Town
studio and now paints from a more spacious studio in Maryland.
The fact that he has survived for
about a decade, uncompromisingly doing what he believes in, shows
that we do have (happily) some visually literate patrons around.
Without such patrons, the Picassos of our time would be in the lunatic
asylum or six feet under.
February, 1998.
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