Embodiment is the tangible or visible form of an idea, quality or feeling. It manifests or makes comprehensible an idea or concept through a physical presentation. For Concordia University St Paul Gallery Eyenga Bokamba presents a series of paintings and light sculptures that expand our ideas of contemporary abstract painting through a poetic embodiment of intentionality.
This body of work reflects an expression of the artist’s innermost thoughts and values. Both physically and conceptually there are layers. For example, in Keep Going Until You Run Out of Paint (2022), the artist layers colors, shapes, and intentions. What’s happening in this abstract work leads the viewer to look longer in examination and the eye is guided around the painting from curved gestures to long road-like images in the lower left. There are dotted lines and map-like structures on the far light–perhaps indicating a way forward or back. There are gestural marks and solid squares. Do these reflect a tension or a map to inner considerations? Through these abstract elements, viewers can bring their own voices, their own memories. Another example of this abstract thinking and making is I Want to Know What Happens Next (2021), an early work in this series. The large gesture to the right is curved, and interrupted with a square and overlapped with a large, loose square and small, heavy yet black ones. For the artist, “these paintings represent the most significant aspects of my artistic practice, which includes a constant exploration of boundaries, continual questioning of assumptions, and a longstanding preoccupation with the power of beauty to enable us to consider issues from another person’s perspective or experience.”
In many of the works in this show, and in particular, in Leaning into Happiness (2022) as well as And So It Begins Again (2022), Bokamba offers up a more recognizable map but frames them with solid yellow in the composition and applies lyrical stepping stone squares. But the maps are central here, drippy and full of movement on one hand and quietly intentional on the other. Chance and planning come together through the artist’s approach, reflecting an interesting tension between the process of composition and intuitive gestures. For more than two decades the artist has worked with the notion of roadmaps, both as a balm of healing and expectation for trying to move forward into the future. They are both literal maps and conceptual meanderings; physical geometric plotting–like a sequence of events guiding the physicality of the journey of mark-making; and internal, cognitive mapping of values and intentionality. Like a roadmap to the abstracted thoughts and gestures of the artist’s hands, the use of mapping and gesture in the paintings reveal to us a complicated nature of the artist’s thought process when making the work. There is an abstracted sense of the intuitive and the gestural. The mapping is abstracted, arched and twisted, allowing for several new synopses to develop. In these works, Bokamba explains, “I strive to create works that extend an invitation to breathe, to reflect, to consider…I strive to create works that pivot on an axis of understanding about what it means to be alive, thriving, and empathetic in today’s world.”
Overall, the embodied intention is about joy. There is a lightness–a happiness–in the work. The colors, the gestures, the treatment of the surface all work together, for example, in the large painting Adjacent to Happiness (2022). For the artist, this is about “being completely honest about the complex collective trauma in the world today and asking, ‘how can we sit squarely in happiness?’ We don’t. We sit adjacent to it.” The maps, squares, and abstract mark-making are like a hopscotch game of learning to lean into joy; you are hopping from one moment to the next rather than expecting an enduring and ongoing uninterrupted time of joy.
These intentionally abstract paintings embody the ideas of joy, yet also reflect serendipity, openness, walking in the present challenging times. The intentional centering of joy as an idea and activating force comes through the work from gesture and color and feeling. Yes, today’s world is complex and our work is never done to be an active part of change, but there are also moments of quiet and of reflection. These works offer us a poetic, visual language for such reflection and understanding; for embodiment. Through visual mapping and abstract mark-making Bokamba asks the viewer to consider a nuanced language of joy and contemplate the emotive gestures and practical transparency through which we may open up possibilities for reimagining the world and ourselves.
Dr Megan Arney Johnston is an independent curator based in Minneapolis/St Paul area and Belfast, Northern Ireland (UK/IRE). Currently a Professor of Practice at several universities, her book Slow Curating: A Handbook for Socially Engaged Curatorial Practices, will be published by Routledge, UK - Heritage and Museum Studies in 2025
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