JENNA GRIBBON AND TOYIN OJIH ODUTOLA: COLOR AS COMMUNIQUÉ

Jessica Bell Brown

For Jenna Gribbon and Toyin Ojih Odutola, color is a pronouncement of sorts. It unlocks a strategic mode of communication that is about being seen and being recognized—a specific foray into a representational world not set apart from the world of the Old Masters but implicated in a system of value, position, and art-historical recognition. Color conveys symbolic power. It conveys emotional or psychological charge, and, like Fra Angelico’s lapis lazuli or Judd’s cadmium red, hues carry a material history and value that make works of art all the more complex conceptually and socially. Artists employ color as a means to control the picture; color provides both access to the world they have built and a re-entry point into the world that we as viewers inhabit. It establishes the preconditions of belief, of verisimilitude, or, in some cases, of dysmorphia. Through subtle shifts in value or tone, one can match a material expression to a corresponding feeling or emotion. These possibilities have stood the test of time, from the oldest creative utterances to the most contemporary paintings hanging in a Chelsea gallery.

Gribbon’s work offers an object lesson in the ways that color can convey the subtle dynamics of power, not unlike in its companion painting, Holbein’s portrait of English Reformationist and lawyer Thomas Cromwell, Earl of Essex. Modes of dress, possessions, and environs intricately arranged and messaged are all dynamics of representation that are often unstable, requiring viewers to believe in the value propositions of the works and meanings. Since the inception of painting, color has been about luxury—color as an economy art, putting Queer Black women in positions of power in place of historical European men. But as Ojih Odutola cautions—in the conclusion of The Tale of Akanke and Aldo (and see her interview with Jason Reynolds in this publication)—representation itself, swapping the demographics of those in power, is no solution. The problem is the system itself, the exploitation of one class of people by another, no matter who they are. From their mythic perch, like an otherworldly visitor who prompts profound reflection on the world we live in, The Listener speaks volumes. AN

Notes

1. Toyin Ojih Odutola et al., Toyin Ojih Odutola: A Countervailing Theory, exh. cat. (The Curve, Barbican Art Gallery, London; Kunsten Museum of Modern Art, Aalborg; and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC), 2020–21.

2. Ibid., 47.

3. Ibid., 12–13. 99