FOND childhood memories always stick like indelible blots and when landmarks that one can identify with from early age get mired in distortions such as media-contaminated imageries, the innocent child in a conscious man prods him to say 'no' and step to say the truth even when there are overwheming voices saying the contrary.Like a social comentator who reels in disbelief as a land he saw in its bliss, peace and beauty with the innocent eyes of a child gets 'misrepresented' as an unsafe axis of violence and all manner of discomforting social tags, the Lagos-based artist and social campaigner, Segun Adejumo, uses the opportunity of his up-coming exhibition of paintings, drawings and some mixed media pieces, Ideas and Ideals, to comment on the errors streotypical mindsets infuse in naratives of Nigeria's current affairs. The show scheduled to hold, November 26 through December 3 at Nettetal Luxury, Azikiwe Road, Old G.R.A. Port Harcourt, Rivers State, highlights this with particular, reference to the now stigmatised Niger Delta region of the country. With 30 paintings ' most of which are rendered in his characteristic warm-coloured impressionistic naturalism ' and about a dozen drawings (a highpoint of his studio which has made its mark as a destination for weekend drawing classes for young corporate goons), Adejumo highlight the flaws in the generally bandied concept of issues relating to the Niger Delta. Emphasising that his is not any attempt to launder but to serve the picture as it is, the artist serves the pictures as he knows the vistae from his direct encounter with the area given his having passed part of his childhood there.Born to Yoruba parents of South-West Nigeria, Adejumo, a painter, sculptor, book illustrator and teacher in his mid 40s, spent his pre-teen and teenage years in Port Harcourt, capital of Rivers State, in the heart of the South-South zone (Niger Delta). 'And it was about the best and most interesting time of my life... We were children from every part of Nigeria in the Unity School... and we never had a barrier between us. Honestly, when I read or hear these things I hear these days about one person coming from one place or the other coming from 'that place,' I get worried and surprised because when we were growing up in Port Harcourt, none of us knew that we hailed from different places. We just played together, played pranks together and roamed around together... The place was, and remains a small joyful and peaceful place. So, I get more worried when I hear them talk of the Niger Delta as a place of violence...'That is why I am offering this body of works... They are not images that torture the canvas or traumatise the viewer. But while I am not brutalising the picture space, I am not deliberately masaging the ego of the Niger Delta. I am showing the area as I know it ' as I saw it without magnification or sensation. 'However, the most significant thing about the exhibition is that I am mounting it in Port Harcourt, not in Lagos where most of my clients and collector are, and where I have staged most of my exhibitions... It is also to show that there is a lot we, outside, do not know about the mainstream art life in the Niger Delta,' said the artist. With his exhibition collection comprising such titles as Beauty is Attitude Down South; Turlips of Yellow; Clashes of Gold; Sporadic Rhythm to a Song Unfold; Easy Motions; We Call it Down South; The Rhythm and I From One Mould; Draw Close; Beats Stir Up My Soul; Waist, Hips and Feet Loose Control' among others, Adejumo focuses on the thrills of the society which, often sensationalised, naratives of rancourous politics, resource control agitations, oil bunkering, abductions and violence have overshadowed.The ouvre shows the artist's flare for body movement, warm colours served in intense hues and bright skies. Ideas and Ideals, Adejumo's 10th solo, presents a painter who hides as much as he shows on canvas or paper ' leaving the viewer to participate, suggestively, if conclusively, in the message of the pictures. The collection also establishes the advancing level of maturity, after rounds of regular solo and group shows, of the artist's studio techniques.Writing in the commissioned review of the exhibition collection, Dapo Adeniyi of Position... culture magazine, captures the advancement Ideas and Ideals represent in the artist's studio. 'It has become something of a habit, while contemplating the work of an artist of Adejumo's magnitude, to want to recount how many exhibitions he has had so far. Ten solo exhibitions for an artist who is not given particularly to making himself conspicuous, that is quite some distance. And not to mention of course, a bunch of group shows, spanning a period of nearly three decades.'He might not have approached a zenith in his career, being still in his prime, but the level of stylistic confidence that he exudes indicates that he is at the very brim of becoming an established craftsman. That also is evident in this outing of his work. He traverses various artistic forms and is manifestly in control of the stylistic and conceptual experimentations that they call for. He traversed all those forms from the very beginning of his practice-from oil mostly on canvas and acrylic to mixed media, charcoal, felt or rapidograph pen on paper, down to sculpture ' and has evolved a peculiar visual language by which his signature is now inscribed. The intensity of his studies of the human from that is so obvious in the sculptural pieces can be discerned even in the canvas and paper surface applications.The majority of his artistic meditations are committed to womanhood and his peculiar perspective of that. The woman seen through his window is an object of fascination and of muted respect.They represent the women from this immediate world: southern women,' notes Adeniyi.Beyond the women and warmth, the show while serving the usual yellows, oranges, orchres and reds ' on almost underpainted formats ' that characterise the Yaba Art School graduates canvas, further ups his credibility as an social campaigner.As Adejumo had done with cancer-struck children for who in 2007, he staged the show, Colours of Hope (Terra Kulture, Lagos) and for the resusitation of drawing by setting up a weekend drawing class, he once again takes a cause that deploys his art to a salient and topical social issue which not many of his contemporaries do.
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