Let's Talk About Art, Baby: Osinachi's "Room: 632" & "Duologue"
Celebrating Some of my Favorite Artistry (on Solana!!!!!)
I remember early 2024 being euphorically triumphant for a bisected soul like mine: I, a crypto art maximalist who nevertheless sprung into NFTs from the speculative cesspool of mid-2021-era Solana. My heart remains, even now, in these two places, stuck somewhere between the gonzo expressiveness of predominantly Ethereum-based crypto art and the profiteering dopamine-machine of Solana PFP trading. But for a brief moment towards the end of 2023 into 2024—owing to Solana’s massive price increase (from ~$18 to over $100) during a time of otherwise stagnation— I no longer had to choose. Artists like WGMeets and Danil Pan and Cath Simard and Patrick Amadon were (or were being recognized, finally, for) creating and offering their work on Solana.
Naturally, as the rest of crypto caught-up price-wise, as Solana’s violet aura lost its sheen, the supposed exodus from Ethereum/Tezos to Solana slowed dramatically.
Still, some intrepid artists from the traditional crypto art ecosystem (which is not to denigrate or diminish the many brilliant Solana-based artists who have been building on platforms like ExchangeArt for years; I just don’t have so much experience with all of you, and being that my education into crypto art, plus crypto art’s own origins, were on Ethereum, it’s inaccurate not to refer to ETH as THE de-facto art chain) have continued to mint works on Solana. Grant Yun —the neo-precisionist darling of many big-time collectors— for example, is probably the most “highly-touted” artist to release Solana-based artwork, which he did a month-or-so ago, and had it gated to collectors either of his or of much artwork on ExchangeArt.
But our purpose today is to talk less about Solana itself and more about two artworks that were recently minted there by one of my all-time favorite crypto artists, Osinachi, the Nigeria-based, MS-Word maestro whose works have been collected by both the Buffalo AKG Art Museum & Toledo Museum of Art.
I have been unabashedly compelled by Osinachi’s work since I first encountered him in the Museum’s Genesis Collection, where we hold his piece, Self-Portrait.
I wrote about Self-Portrait in 2021, saying in the essay that:
“[Osinachi’s] images seem to exist at the very edge of the physical, as if made from felt that’s been plastered on canvas, perhaps a nod to his self-styled lack of formal training. His characters lack faces, but never emotion. In fact, every surface drips with emotion. All the minute emotions of a life, you can feel them in the colors and in all the small choices — a hat is positioned just so, the chin cast downward like this. Osinachi’s subject, himself, is presented here without eyes. And yet, he doesn’t lack a direct line of sight, nor all the inflection of an eyebrow.”
I thought it fitting to invoke that passage as I direct your attention now to the two pieces Osinachi minted last week, on Wednesday the 15th of May, in editions of 50 and 250 respectively. I stumbled upon these pieces not when Osinachi minted them, but when I saw someone dismayingly mention how few had been minted.
I have to say, this feels like a consequence of minting artwork on a young, speed-based chain. Solana folks don’t care much for history because A) they don’t have much of it, B) it’s a chain rooted in acceleration, and C) they have their own lingo, network of superstars, and iconography.
And yet, to students of his history, there is no question that Osinachi’s latest works are masterful expansions of his style, where the artist’s trademark self-subjectivity and textural brilliance explode into richer narratives than ever before.
Osinachi has always had a knack for capturing his own broad self within his pieces, but in these two artworks, he shows himself masterful at capturing also the observer. He’s done this before, by the way, insinuating us into the pieces. But before, when we were there in the frame, we were always known, always seen, the characters either looking directly at us as in Umunwoke Mama or expecting something from us like in Your Turn; our role in the frame was laid out for us. But in these two new pieces, we are turned into voyeurs, privy to visions of the artist which feel altogether more honest, edgier, more conflictive.
Let’s take a look at the pieces, shall we?
First, Room: 632.
As far as Osinachi’s works which I know (preodminantly from SuperRare), this is the only one where he includes a wider world in the image itself. Always, his frames are tight and compact boxes. Backgrounds are often expressive and colorful and abstract, elsewhere they might be firmly-figurative and recognizable spaces, but they are always self-contained ecosystems. The artist herein has decided to maximize his place in the frame (center, contrasting) while nevertheless insisting on his relative smallness, establishing questions of legacy, self-image, relationships. Room: 632 is also unique among Osinachi’s pieces in that the subject’s face is not revealed to us, a choice made only one other time (from what I am aware), in a piece called The Avalanche, about which Osinachi wrote:
“Sometimes, the anxiety that comes with the pandemic presses down like an avalanche. This work is part of the “COVID-19: A General State of Anxiety” series.
About Room: 632, Osinachi writes:
“The piece invites the viewer to think about preparing oneself in isolation (as symbolized by nudity) before leaving the room, fully clothed to meet the world head-on.”
And thus, a connection between these two pieces emerges via isolation. I wonder if it’s appropriate to suggest that the characters we see in most of Osinachi’s pieces have “prepared” themselves to be painted. These figures are often posing, extremely expressive, aware of being seen. The nude subject captured in Room: 632, on the other hand, is blithely unaware of what eyes which may see him, an isolation as much perspective-based as it is compositional. Here, however, there isn’t a negative implication regarding that isolation; the colors are too bright, the subject stands too tall, the city outside the window is distant and sparse, but it’s inviting and blue-skied. I get the sense of a man rising and not of a man being enclosed.
In Room: 632 our unprepared and naked subject is honest-by-necessity. The room around him is full of color and abstraction but nothing in the way of distraction or obstacle between he and we. He cannot hide, he isn’t hiding, he feels no need to hide. The exhibitionist decides to stand nude before the window to the world, to let all eyes come which may, to place oneself at the mercy of those eyes.
Feels pregnant, no? Consider this point as we move on to Osinachi’s next piece, far more provocative to my western sensibilities, the ironically-titled Duologue:
Writing about Duologue, Osinachi says:
“I originally made ‘Duologue’ to explore the Baroque technique of drama and movement — to create the feeling of a beginning, a middle and a climax all at once. For me, the piece is also a call for retrospection in each individual. Like, step out of yourself for once and have a conversation with your other self. Call it self-talk; call it internal dialogue; call it soliloquy.”
Duologue is the compositional antithesis to Room: 632. It contains many subjects. The outside world is shut-out via solid, obfuscating color. We see not only expressiveness, but an overload of it; we are asked to sort through the ambiguous emotions on eight different faces, to draw out the narrative from a piece that is drowning in varied movement, melodramas, allusions to other masterworks.
I see in the body laying on the floor Anthony van Dyck’s 1635 painting The Lamentation Over the Dead Christ.
I see in the outstretched hands an intimation of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel Ceiling (though it is objectively funny that when the seated figure reaches out for help, one of the standing figures offers his hand in assistance while the other recreates a Renaissance painting in response).
There are figures in Duologue which seem only vaguely interested in the dramatic proceedings on the other side of the room. One, the right most figure, is holding a Joker card, as if the frame’s narrative is frustratingly interrupting his game.
And so in Duologue, I suppose, every possible reaction of the audience is codified into the piece. The fallen, the affected, the savior-complexed, the careless, the distracted, the concerned, the annoyed. All of these people beofre us, and yet we ourselves still feel like we’re seeing something not meant for us. Osinachi says in his description for the piece that “the work has become a defiance of that warped way of thinking about nudity in works of art — a pollution fueled mostly by religious morality,” but I nevertheless remain in thrall to my western upbringing, where nudity is affrontive and extremely private. The figures in Duologue, they are not just nude and exposed, they are touching one another, without shame and without appearing to give much thought to their nudity. Yet we must. Or, perhaps it’s better to say, I must. It is not the first of Osinachi’s pieces to feature nudity. There is Dave and Resignation, for example, but both pieces feature characters at rest, and they are positioned alone in their frames, and so there is not this feeling that we have espied something which was not meant for our eyes.
It is almost as if, in Duologue, we are window washers on the outside of the building featured in Room: 632, as if we have happened upon a scene-in-progress but have not yet been noticed. What the exhibitionist figure in Room: 632 invites in is what we in Duologue experience; in the former, voyeurism provoked by the subject’s action, where in the latter, that voyeurism feels appropriately forbidden, ironic considering the many individuals present in the pieces.
And so, ultimately, there are a manner of dialogues in these pieces which I have not even begun to do more than briefly recognize. These pieces are in conversation with one another, with Osinachi’s entire oeuvre, with elements drawn from various eras in art history.
Ultimately, what is more important than the dialogues themselves is that we can hear them so loudly. Room: 632 whispers, Duologue murmurs in stupefied tones, but both can be heard muttering underneath the loud colors, the screaming textures, the gasps and hot breaths and shrieking city streets that evaporate off each frame’s internal narrative.
Osinachi’s pieces have always spoke. With these two pieces, I am listening closely, I am almost making out words.
-Your friendly neighborhood art writer,