Connoisseur of the Sacred: Bruce Onobrakpeya as a Great Christian Artist
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Connoisseur of the Sacred
Bruce Onobrakpeya as a Great Christian Artist
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
A version of Bruce Onobrakpeya's Rovue Esiri, The Front of the Church of Good News
Abstract
An exploration of Bruce Onobrakpeya as a great Christian artist through the lens of his work Rovue Esiri, The Front of the Church of Good News, pictures of versions of which are shown in the essay, along with details of those versions, images from Onobrakpeya's book Spirit in Ascent and one image by myself.
The Nigerian artist Bruce Onobrakpeya is often described in terms of his remarkable reworking of inspiration from the sacred arts of his native Urhobo culture, at times correlated with Edo, Yoruba, Fulani and other African sacred arts.
It's also true, though, that Onobrakpeya is a great Christian artist, exploring Christian subjects with inimitable power, in works both idiosyncratic and compelling, breaking from conventions established in centuries of artistically engaging with Christian images in different parts of the world, actualizing his amazingly individualistic sensitivity to the rhythms of the sacred, bringing alive an orientation towards the numinous, the uncanny and yet compelling power of the holy, across various zones of reference in Christianity.
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A version of Rovue Esiri, The Front of the Church of Good News
What excites me into making these observations as I write this at 3.30 am on Saturday, April 27, 2024, one of my first actions for the day on rising from sleep, is my visit yesterday to Onobrakpeya's house in Mushin, Lagos, a revelatory experience at various levels, a visit in which he provided the answer to my question on the image of Jesus Christ rising from the dead in his work Rovue Esiri, The Front of the Church of Good News, as described in his book The Spirit in Ascent.
A version of Rovue Esiri, The Front of the Church of Good News
"Could you show me which of the images in that densely populated work, its profusion of forms like a living network of plants, suffused by the arcane atmosphere of a sacred grove in a tropical forest, stands for Christ rising from the dead?" I asked, showing him the picture in his book.
He pointed to a non-humanoid form, a vertically elongated shape which could be described as rising from a dense cluster of enchantingly unique shapes of houses crowding the bottom of the work, a form bearing no relationship to the various depictions I have encountered of Christ across centuries of Christian iconography in different countries, particularly in Europe, the origin of Christianity as a civilization shaping and globally penetrative religion.
Christ rising from the dead in a version of Rovue Esiri, The Front of the Church of Good News.
Spacecraft or human form? Aerodynamic streamlining within complex mechanical structure or elaborate organic construct? The most original depiction of Christ rising from the dead known to me.
Writing this, my mind goes to one of the most remarkable examples of depictions of Christ rising from the dead, the luminous painting by German artist Mathias Grunewald (1470-1528), in which Christ rises from the tomb, his body resplendent, the entire scene ablaze with the glow from the halo surrounding his head, his stance aerodynamic in its upward motion, his gestures mystical, his eyes shining with supernatural triumph, a human form radiating a greater than human power, a painting representing the human form in terms of association with supernatural power.
The Resurrection by Mathias Grunewald
Grunewald depicts a climatic point in Christian narrative, a centre of Christian theology, the story of Christ rising from the dead, defeating the ultimate mystery beyond which humanity is not able to perceive, the impenetrable walls of death.
A saying from the Akan of Ghana states, "Odomankoman, the creator of the universe, created Death and Death killed him". Odomankoman, however, is able to eventually defeat Death, upon which Odomankoman lives forever, as presented in J. B. Danquah's The Akan Doctrine of God.
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Christ rising in a version of Rovue Esiri, The Front of the Church of Good News.
A Fulani creation story describes how the ultimate creator created a succession of existents, each of which made itself into a problem, until the Creator created another thing that conquered it, leading to the creation of worry, which conquered the pride of sleep, upon which worry became too proud, leading to the creation of Death, which defeated worry.
Death then became too proud, upon which the Creator descended and
defeated Death, as depicted, among other sources, in the best analysis of this
poem known to me, Senanu and Vincent's edited African Poetry.
The church in a version of Rovue Esiri, The Front of the Church of Good News
Death is the final frontier of Earthly existence, a void, a blank space devoid of light, which humanity tries to penetrate through claimed actual accounts of people rising from the dead or fictional depictions of such happenings and of journeys to where the dead live, death being a defining reality of biological life, one of the most perplexing and most painful aspects of human existence, a yet insurmountable challenge, hence the account of Christ rising from the dead is particularly strategic to Christian theology.
What has Onobrakpeya done with this pivotal moment in the Christian
narrative?
Christ rising in a a version of Rovue Esiri, The Front of the Church of Good News
His risen Christ is not recognizably human, the closest to the human frame it represents being the lower half of the figure, which could suggest feet poised in aerodynamic grace, like the stance of a ballet dancer.
The
rest of the figure, however, evokes a different world from the human cosmos,
with protrusions from its middle section more like the legs of a four legged
animal, complemented by a hump swelling from the midsection opposite those protrusions.
A version of Rovue Esiri, The Front of the Church of Good News
What has this iconoclast, this radical recreator, done to the revered image of Jesus-irreverence, denigration or radically creative rethinking?
Where is the beautifully
faced man of Galilee, the handsome preacher the European artists made world
famous as the image of the Galilean?
That is an imagined face, which artists used in evoking a man whom no one painted in his time, being a relatively obscure person, ignominiously and painfully executed after being rejected even by his fellow Jews, his message seen as a negative appropriation of their religion, an affront exacerbated by his uncompromising derision of their religious institutions as inauthentic.
Christ rising in a version of Rovue Esiri, The Front of the Church of Good News
Why would Onobrakpeya depart from the obviously sensible approach, demonstrated by centuries of internationally recognized depictions of Jesus as the human being he was, even though seen as God in human form?
Onobrakpeya seems more interested in the radical idea of spiritual identity as undefinable by any form conceivable by humanity, choosing therefore, to visualize this spiritual icon in terms of an agglomeration of images drawn perhaps, from various worlds of nature and human creation, human, animal, technological and purely imagined, placing it within a forest of visual evocations, akin to the water spirit Ekene emerging into the Ekene sacred groves in Onobrakpeya's native Agbarha-Otor as the spirit is invited to dwell there for the duration of the Ekene festival in its recurrence after more than a decade.
The church in a version of Rovue Esiri, The Front of the Church of Good News
"My interest in Christian art is in principles, universal principles" he could be paraphrased as declaring at our meeting of 27th April.
'"Principles dramatizing the essence of the sacred, not its localized expressions, not Jesus as a Jew who lived in Galilee but as an embodiment of something integrating and transcending the historical specificities of his existence" as Onobrakpeya's words could be reconstructed.
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The church and the foot of the rising Christ in a version of Rovue Esiri, The Front of the Church of Good News
Onobrakpeya then took me upstairs in his house to see a version of the work hanging in his stairwell and I was blown away by the ordered cacophony of artistic forms clustered at the bottom of the wall where the work hangs, a constellation of art from Onobrakpeya's own creations to other African art masterpieces, a potent shrine assemblage, the creation of shrines projecting his own secular spirituality being one of Onobrakpeya's greatest strengths.
A version of Rovue Esiri, The Front of the Church of Good News hanging above the shrine assemblage in the stairwell of Onobrakpeya's house in Mushin. Picture by me.
Detail of church, worshippers and the foot of the rising Christ in a version of Rovue Esiri, The Front of the Church of Good News
The Islamic thinker Ibn Arabi declares in the Tarjuman al-Ashwaq,The Interpreter of Desires, "O Marvel! a garden amidst the flames: ( my heart) is a pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian monks...a temple for idols and the pilgrim's Kaa'ba, and the tables of the Torah and the book of the Quran. I follow the religion of Love: whatever way Love's camels take, that is my religion and my faith", a vision also projected by Onobrakpeya, whose art and thought replace the problematic term "idols" from Arabi's formulation with the more inclusive and more accurate "images of the sacred".
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Johnson OLUATA
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