Written by Margaux Villard

Nigerian-born Toyin Odutola defines the concept of Blackness through her portraitures done by ball point pen ink and acrylic ink on black matted or glossed board. The colour black of the ball-pen she uses, gives a much wider spectrum of radiations to it than first thought of and the complexion of the characters takes on new shades and new hues as the ink transfers to the paper. From every detail the colour’s ability to catch the light and reflect it rendered by this technique creates a magnetic effect that draws us in.

There seem to be something raw, almost anatomical about them, yet the artist wanted to deviate from the anatomical standard. The way she has worked on every detail of the skin, isolating her subjects from the outside world is meant to puzzle the viewer and to put him in an in-between state: the portraits are “recognizable yet foreign”.

The high spot of her work is definitely the skin whether she uses black colour or other tones, everything revolves around it. The extended treatment she makes of it emphasizing the musculature of her characters, the skin’s texture, transforms the latter into a geographical area for the viewer to investigate; she refers to it as “experiential geography” which she intends on transferring onto a person. It is the latter that tells us a visual story but somehow we take part in this process because the rendering of the person through the skin “leaves a space for one to implant his/her ideas of belonging and not belonging, possession and freedom”.

Toyin gives an interesting explanation of her works “Where some may see flat, static narratives, I see a spectrum of tonal gradations and realities. What I am creating is literally black portraiture with ballpoint pen ink. I’m looking for that in-between state in an individual where the overarching definition is lost. Skin as geography is the terrain I expand by emphasizing the specificity of blackness, where an individual’s subjectivity, various realities and experiences can literally be drawn onto the diverse topography of the epidermis. From there, the possibilities of portraying a fully-fledged person are endless.