Footnotes

Provenance
Acquired in Lagos in the 1960's;
A private collection.

Encapsulating the most dominant elements of arguably Yusuf Grillo's most successful works, Head presents us with an image of strength and emotion through palette, technique, and subject matter. The present work is a prominent painting in the artists oeuvre, an artist who equally dominated the post-colonial modern art movement in Nigeria and indeed set the philosophical tone for the future. With 'archenteric pictorial sensibility', as Chika Okeke-Agulu coins his approach, this was a concept that can be detected within this present work. (Chicka Okeke-Agulu, Yusuf Grillo, Painting. Lagos. Life., (Italy: Sikra Editore S.p.A., 2020), p. 15.)

Philosophical manifestations of womanhood were a favoured thematic subject of Grillo's. The artist greatly admired women's wisdom and strength and saw them as the central pillars in society. Perhaps contributing to this outlook, Grillo's own cultural context provided him with this framework of appreciation. With demonstrations of honour bestowed onto women from the community in Yoruba celebrations such as the Gelede masquerade, older women are praised as metaphysically strong figures of society. The Gelede, as Art Historian Babatunde Lawal attests, is now only performed by men who do so under the influence of Lyalase, the highest ranking female in society to honour the aje, the "powerful mothers of the night" (Babatunde Lawal, The Gẹ̀lẹ̀dé spectacle: Art, Gender, and Social Harmony in African Culture, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), p. 283). The mask constitutes of a gele (similarly worn by the subject of this painting), oja, and aro. Indeed, the female figure is widely celebrated in Yoruba culture in equal measure to Grillo's celebration of the conceptual relevance of women maintained in his work.

An iconic element of the artist's oeuvre is his recurring blue palette. Perhaps underpinned by his formal artistic training at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology and then Cambridge university, Grillo embraced the impact of Western art into his own work innkeeping with the concept of 'Natural Synthesis'. It could be said that this use of a blue (and its derivatives) could have been informed by Pablo Picasso's blue period of the early 20th century. However, the colour blue also points to the adire dye commonly used in West Africa and Yoruba communities and supports the idea of the Yoruba influence in the artist's work. In working within this chromatic colour palette, light and depth of colour provide dimension to the work, enabling the painting itself, in technique and practise, to be at the forefront of the image. Grillo's exploration of this optical effect allows him to navigate an idea of the metaphysical world allowing both focus and detail amongst an algorithm of technique and palette.

While the present work is indeed a display of Lagos life, it is additionally a masterful display of the artist's techniques and academic attribution. The relative anonymity of the subject, beyond being that of a woman, lays bare the quality of the work, open and philosophically conceptual in its subject. Sincere and indeed committed to his arguments of how one should paint, one may conclude that beyond contextual physical realities, the palette and form of the work is coherent in contributing to the metaphysical ideals Grillo synthesises his work upon.


Bibliography
Chicka Okeke-Agulu, Yusuf Grillo, Painting. Lagos. Life., (Italy: Sikra Editore S.p.A., 2020)
Babatunde Lawal, The Gẹ̀lẹ̀dé spectacle: Art, Gender, and Social Harmony in African Culture, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996).