Alpha Odhiambo is a Kenyan Contemporary artist whose paintings speak of Africanity in relation to land, history, and the body. He wields color and texture to direct the gaze and prompt cultural critique through juxtaposed objects of meaning.

In the acrylic painting, 1 man 2 lives, by contemporary Kenyan artist, Alpha Odh, color and line speak of inner-happiness as a rupture to capitalist commodification of African bodies, and creates a window into the double consciousness of the individual. Yellow speaks of happiness, shining brightly. The yellow sunflowers on the top right and the diagonally placed yellow painted nails catch the eye for their warmth against deeper earthy tones. Yellow also lies beneath the brown skin, it is the foundation of the man, shining through scratches in his skin—they are more than the artists love for texture. Odhiambo uses scratches to reference West African scarification practices which increased during the Atlantic slave trade as a means of protection against purchase by European enslavers who fetishized a spotless body for commodity. His use of yellow here proclaims a lambent inner-light that protects and distinguishes the very being of the individual. The yellow flowers and yellow nail polish are both external objects of happiness that emphasize the sitters active indignation against the steely suppressed blues of his surroundings. These happiness objects are excluded from the frame that encloses the man in the mirror, only his skin-deep glow remaining. The frame holding him is created by vertical lines which define the mirror, and the dark grey shadow that lines the body of the man in the room. The artist uses line and color to create a double consciousness with a dialectic relationship to each other—two contradictory selves are deeply interconnected, mutually shaping each other and coexisting. Paint plashes symbolize stress, which moves from one mans ear and out the other mans opposite ear, splashing against the mirror and back out again, in a constant feedback loop with oneself. This movement created by line and color communicate the internal voice and thoughts. The man exists in a frame within a frame, a self-referential space, indicating a deep psychological territory to sit in. The artist splits the doubled man in half with the only fully extending line in the painting, making the division of self complete.

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Enjoy other pieces by Alpha Odh, and visit his Instagram Profile: Alpha Odh

The piece below; untitled, is an impressionist sun-bathing scene where color adorns and is the very foundation of Black skin. Odhiambo pulled colors from a digital image of skin in the sunlight and emphasized that race is a social construct and not a biological fact. The leisurely posture, intense heat, and the leisurely cigarette are symbols of Africanity due to their relationship to the land and surroundings; their proximity to each other speak to a larger theme across Ohdhiambo’s work of Kenyan and young Africans’ psychology around the self within the present socio-political-economic landscape of Kenya and Africa. The sitter is relaxed yet twisted up, and the sitter is made of many warm, red and purple shades that, when juxtaposed against the neat green and blue lines of the background, appear to be brown and metamorphic. Race is implicated and therefore shattered, or exposed as illusory, in the relationship the sitter has to their environment, and in the way bright light is turns to many colors. The viewer may then begin to wonder what other things contextualize race and shape impressions of the being.

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ARTIST SPOTLIGHT : ALPHA ODHIAMBO

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