Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Areogun of Osi-Ilorin
Nigerian, Yoruba; 20th-century
St. Louis, MO: Saint Louis Art Museum
77%
Door Panels. c1930. Wood
You'd be hard-pressed to find an artwork from any period with more visual information than this, inch-for-inch. (It's like Walsh's Big Trail.) For the most part that's this carved door's boon, but it's also what holds it back from attaining the artistic heights of a master of the idiom, like Olowe. Unlike the best such carvings, which are willing to transgress the structural parameters they impose on themselves (by pulling a figure so far away from its ground that it pops out of frames on all three axes; by odd arrhythmic placements within rhythmic arrangements), Areogun's door is hemmed in completely — its order is fully determined — by a narrative urgency that manifests as pictorial density. It's a dazzling and full composition, but to its detriment it's essentially planar: the fact that it is carved in relief provides body to what's depicted, but those bodies, for the sake it seems of conveying their narrative relations with each other, are packed so tight behind what's essentially a picture plane that there's no room for the free play of sculptural forms. In a word, this door is richly suggestive of three dimensions but almost doesn't seem dimensional. West African door carving can succeed, but does not thrive, in low relief. (2024)