Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. You are there, with your glasses of lukewarm champagne and your overblown comments on contemporary art, pretending to understand what is happening before your eyes. But have you really seen Toyin Ojih Odutola? Not just glanced at her works in passing, but delved into the deep layers of her drawings, where the skin becomes a cartography of a visceral experience that you can only brush against?
The work of Toyin Ojih Odutola is an act of resistance against narrative simplifications. This Nigerian-American artist, with her ballpoint pens, pastels, and charcoal, creates much more than portraits; she forges bodily landscapes that tell alternative stories, parallel worlds where black protagonists escape the shackles of colonial history. She transforms black skin into a sumptuous territory of infinite possibilities.
What strikes immediately is her meticulous layering technique. Each square centimeter of skin in her drawings contains a universe of deliberate marks, wavy textures that seem to pulse under your gaze. This approach inevitably recalls Édouard Glissant’s philosophy and his concept of “Poetics of Relation” [1]. Glissant speaks to us about identity as a rhizome, a system of multiple and interconnected roots rather than a single, dominant root. He rejects identity as a fixed essence and embraces identity as a relation, as a dynamic process of encounters and exchanges.
Isn’t this exactly what Ojih Odutola does? Her technique of superimposed layers evokes this rhizomatic vision of identity. She creates characters whose skin is a crossroads of stories, influences, and possible becomings. “I read marking as a form of language,” she says, “in the same way one might read English.” [2] The marks on the skin are not mere aesthetic traits but a complex semiotic system that narrates experiences of displacement, migration, and identity recomposition.
In her exhibition “To Wander Determined” at the Whitney Museum, Ojih Odutola created a series of fictional portraits relating the history of two aristocratic Nigerian families united by the marriage of two men. This speculative fiction is a bold political gesture that transforms the postcolonial imaginary. By conceiving an alternative Nigeria where homosexuality is not criminalized, where black wealth is normalized and celebrated, she does not merely represent “what is” but explores “what could be”.
This approach echoes the speculative literature of Octavia Butler, whose signature Ojih Odutola bears tattooed on her left hand. Butler and Ojih Odutola share the ability to use fiction as a laboratory for social experimentation, to question and reconfigure power structures. As Butler writes in “Parable of the Sower”: “Everything you touch, you change. Everything you change changes you.” [3] The creative act thus becomes an act of transformation, both personal and collective.
The power of Ojih Odutola’s work lies precisely in its ability to make us imagine other possible worlds, other social configurations. By placing her black characters in contexts of power, leisure, and intimacy rarely represented in Western art, she expands the horizon of possibilities. Her protagonists are not defined by their suffering or resistance to oppression but exist fully in their complex individuality.
Consider “The Firmament” (2018), that masterful work where a dark-skinned figure stands out against a background of deep blue. The richness of the skin’s texture, with its luminous striations and velvety shadows, transcends mere biological representation to become cosmic. The skin is no longer just a bodily envelope but a starry sky, a firmament. This transmutation of the body into cosmos recalls Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological approach, for whom the body is our “anchoring in the world,” the zero point of all perception and experience [4].
In “A Countervailing Theory” (2020), her first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom, Ojih Odutola pushes her narrative exploration even further. She invents a prehistoric matriarchal civilization in the Jos Plateau of Nigeria, where a ruling class of warrior women enslave artificially created men. This inversion of gender and power relations confronts us with our most deeply rooted presuppositions about the “natural order” of things.
Through this alternative mythology, Ojih Odutola questions not only gendered structures of domination but also the narrative archetypes that shape our understanding of history. She thus reveals that what we consider “natural” or “inevitable” is often merely a contingent construction, one narrative among other possible ones. This decolonial approach challenges the epistemic foundations of Western domination.
Her use of black and white drawing technique in this series emphasizes the archaeological nature of her approach, as if she were unearthing vestiges of a forgotten history. The circular composition of the exhibition at the Barbican, where the viewer follows a curved path without ever seeing the entire story at a single glance, reinforces this impression of gradual discovery, of a narrative that unfolds step by step.
But it is perhaps in her series “The Treatment” (2015-2016) that Ojih Odutola pushes her reflection on the mechanisms of racial construction the furthest. By representing famous white male figures with black skin, she exposes whiteness as a social construct rather than a biological given. If a Picasso or a Prince Charles can be represented with black skin without affecting their recognition, it is because race is above all a system of culturally encoded signs and values.
Let us return to Glissant and his distinction between “systemic thought” and “trace thought.” The former seeks to categorize everything, to freeze everything in stable and separate identities. The latter accepts the unforeseeable, the opaque, the perpetual movement of identities. Ojih Odutola’s work firmly inscribes itself within this trace thought: it blurs boundaries, complicates identities, celebrates opacity as a fundamental right not to be completely understood or categorized.
“I am not interested in documenting my daily life as it is,” the artist declares, “but in vignettes of things, moments, memories, things that don’t entirely make sense but are not necessarily surrealistic. There is reality in my work, but this reality is a scaffolding for the imagination to emerge, proliferate, and circulate.” [5] This statement could just as well come from Glissant himself, who defends the right to opacity against the universalizing pretensions of Western transparency.
In her more recent series, “Tell Me A Story, I Don’t Care If It’s True” (2020), created during the lockdown in New York, Ojih Odutola juxtaposes text and image to explore the multiple truths that can coexist within a single narrative. This series echoes the theories of philosopher Jean-François Lyotard on the end of grand narratives and the emergence of multiple and contradictory micro-narratives [6]. In an era characterized by “alternative facts” and ideological polarization, this reflection on the ambiguous nature of narrative truth takes on particular resonance.
Ojih Odutola’s art is also profoundly theatrical. Her characters seem aware of being observed but refuse to perform for the external gaze. They exist in a state of deliberate nonchalance that decenters the viewer. Even when they face the observer, they seem to look beyond, toward a horizon we cannot perceive. This resistance to the colonizing gaze recalls Sartrean phenomenology and its conception of the other’s gaze as potentially objectifying [7].
In “Chosen” (2020), two characters contemplate a shop window marked “SALE.” One of them adjusts their lip gloss while a conversation about self-esteem unfolds. “Don’t worry, if we had the choice, we wouldn’t choose ourselves,” says one. “Well… I would choose you,” replies the other. This seemingly banal scene condenses all the complexity of intersubjective relations in a capitalist and post-colonial context where black bodies are constantly commodified.
What fundamentally distinguishes Ojih Odutola from many contemporary artists is her categorical refusal of pathos and trauma as the only modes of representing black bodies. She insists on joy, contemplation, and rest as experiences that are just as political and significant as suffering or resistance. In an artistic landscape where black pain is often spectacularized and commodified, this celebration of quietude and leisure constitutes a radical act.
As she explains herself: “What happens if you claim every place you go as home? Some black people avoid traveling because they fear (reasonably) encountering racism. I wanted to help attenuate this hesitation by representing black people outdoors, in nature, swimming in lagoons, relaxing on the beach, admiring the sunset.” [8] This normalization of black presence in spaces of leisure and contemplation is profoundly political in its very banality.
Ojih Odutola’s approach is reminiscent of that of Toni Morrison, who claimed to want to write the books she would have liked to read. The artist creates the images she would have liked to see as a child, representations where black people exist fully in their complex humanity, their beauty, and their daily banality. “The work I do now is the work my nine-year-old self imagined,” she says, “just as the earlier work was what my five-year-old self conjured up.” [9]
This connection to childhood is not trivial. It is precisely in childhood that our first imaginaries are formed, our first visions of the possible. By creating alternative worlds where black people naturally occupy positions of power, leisure, and intimacy, Ojih Odutola expands the horizon of possibilities for future generations. She offers what feminist theorist bell hooks would call “spaces of agency,” representations that allow one to imagine oneself as an actor rather than a mere object of another’s gaze [10].
The strength of her work also lies in its balance between the intimate and the political, between the personal and the collective. Her portraits, though fictional, possess such presence, such vitality that they seem to breathe before our eyes. This ability to breathe life into her paper characters testifies not only to exceptional technical mastery but also to deep empathy.
For despite all its conceptual sophistication, Ojih Odutola’s art remains profoundly human. It touches us not because it explains a theory but because it makes us feel an experience. The texture of her drawn skin becomes a metaphor for a stratified existence, complex, rich in contradictions and possibilities.
In a world still too often structured around the white, male, and Western gaze, Toyin Ojih Odutola offers us a radically different vision, where black skin is no longer a stigma but a cosmos, where identity is no longer a cage but a playground. She expands our conception of the possible, pushes back the boundaries of the imaginable, and reminds us that every dominant narrative can be contested, subverted, reinvented.
So, you bunch of snobs, the next time you contemplate a work by Ojih Odutola, perhaps you will see beyond her technical virtuosity, perhaps you will feel this invitation to inhabit the world differently, to imagine other possibilities. And if not, well, content yourselves with your lukewarm champagne and your insipid conversations. Ojih Odutola’s art will continue to exist, to breathe, and to transform the world, with or without your understanding.
- Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, Gallimard, 1990.
- Kristin Farr, “Toyin Ojih Odutola, Infinite Possibility”, Juxtapoz, September-October 2017.
- Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower, Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993.
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Gallimard, 1976.
- Kristin Farr, “Toyin Ojih Odutola, Infinite Possibility”, Juxtapoz, September-October 2017.
- Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, Éditions de Minuit, 1979.
- Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, Gallimard, 1943.
- Jackie Mantey, “Art you should know: Painter Toyin Ojih Odutola”, May 22, 2018.
- Kristin Farr, “Toyin Ojih Odutola, Infinite Possibility”, Juxtapoz, September-October 2017.
- bell hooks (Gloria Jean Watkins), Black Looks: Race and Representation, South End Press, 1992.
