Hanging on the wall at the West Palm Beach in Miami Florida, Two naked figures, swirl poses, trimmed muscles and broad chests, wide arms and tight thighs in shades of gray and black like shadows pointing to a reality. Their hands in undulating movements, lost in the charm of nature’s awe, sitting on branches of trees like creatures domestic in the wood. Oblivious to the path that exists around, locked in a world of sounds and rhythms, like men dancing to tunes only the lost can hear. Indeed, Eternal Bonds is a lot to deconstruct, the artist once again presents his viewers with a visual dialogue this time in the relationship between two people.
Two images are glaringly visible at the center of this painting. The bodily features are undefined but the physique gives some insight into what they could be and their actions or motive. To the left is a human figure sitting on a large tree branch – the foreground texture of the wood carefully traced in black lineal demarcations depicts that the object is sitting on a tree fallen enough to be bent as a seat with branches running through the piece. This figure’s arms are built with muscles reminiscent of a man but the confusion is in looking closely at the chest region; the two spherical shapes evoke the impression of a woman’s mammary gland. It is difficult to tell if the figure is a male or female. This is more confusing when you consider the thinness of the waist region. The obvious presence of a white headphone cannot be overlooked. The second figure with a bean shaped head, thin neck, broad chest has less defined muscles and a little protruding stomach. The waist is still tiny and the muscles of the legs are almost undefined as another tree branch is covering a larger part of that space of the figure’s body.
The use of colors in this panel is almost unemotional. The artist’s combination of gray tones, gold, black and pink palette hues give the illusion of a state of mind where nothing is happening and it is not a function of stagnation. It is more of the idea that there is movement in two different worlds that do not interfere with each other. The presence of trees is a testament that life at a certain level spurred by movement of different elements is happening, the movement of the two naked figures in undulating motion towards each other with ears blocked to sounds and rhythms we cannot hear but makes sense to them enough to elicit the movement of their bodies also testifies to another world ongoing inside of them.
No doubt Eternal Bonds is a puzzle. It seems that the missing piece beyond the composition and engagement of color is in the title. Relationships are an integral part of our human existence, while our relations may be full of occasional frictions that forge stronger bonds among us, the strength of two human beings in any form of relationship (especially romatic) with each other is the understanding that a relationship is an entire universe on it’s own demanding that other concurrent universes do not interfere in the dynamics that each relationship presents, hence we find these two figures focused on their own found universe through the instrumentality of the rhythm produced by the headset and finding the language of communication in that universe where they can dance towards each other naked, even though there is the presence of another universe around them. Indeed Eternal Bonds are only formed in this fashion.
By Guest Author
Mathew Oyedele