images courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, NY

“Color/Should not be submissive/It cannot be subjugated/It will not obey/It should not play nice/Color is unruly/It is not for the faint of heart/It can be hard and strong/It can be bold/It can be clear and true/It can also lie/It can trick and deceive us all/Color does what it wants/ It misbehaves/ But most importantly/Color can change our minds.”  These words belong to the painter Odili Donald Odita. His singsong manifesto is no less romantic and optimistic for its mischievous tone.

Within it we feel the same beating chaos hovering beneath the surface of his paintings. His recent works are noisy and confrontational; they vibrate, tease and tickle your nose. There is something extremely playful and irreverent about Odita’s bands of color, however there is nothing trivial about them. Each painting is carefully designed, its discordant and bulging parts are expertly and purposefully placed.
Within these works we see a reverence for content, but also traces of the purely optical. In his larger canvases there is always the strained desire for transience, sublimity and resolution. You will find no trace of cataclysm or performative triumph, no pivotal moment of breakthrough.

These are not snapshots of discovery, but realms of exploration, in which content is latent.
For Odita, a Nigerian immigrant, truth is complex and illusive. His canvases are reflections on black. His blues, yellows and reds jostle and bump, revealing the chunky truth of the melting pot myth. Totality is not aggregate but individual. Caught in the formal wormhole between structural device and color we see the faint drifting specters of modernism. These are not old ghosts, but happy remembrances, born of complexity.