Odili Donald Odita at Jack Shainman Gallery

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Odili Donald Odita’s colors are not easy. Like Ellsworth Kelly or Ad Reinhardt, they sting the eye with deep chromatic intensity. For Odita, color creates a complex set of relationships, a rhythm. In the artist’s show here, his abstract paintings—made on wood panels topped with striated wood veneer—glow with acrylic shapes arranged in shimmering configurations, touching and then breaking apart, which dehising in seemingly endless multiplication. While looking at Odita’s works, I forgot about their edges, because it seems that her patterns can go beyond the borders of the panel, filling the surrounding space.

However, in sticking to these compositions, concrete realities begin to emerge, making his elegantly conceived paintings difficult to carry. Take the name of the exhibition, Burning Cross, (all works cited, 2022), which features groupings of elongated knife-like triangles that extend across the four quadrants of the composition to form something resembling the titular figure. Although the title of this work directly refers to racial violence in the United States, other pieces, such as Global, work more subtly. Here, a quartet of jagged shapes rendered in beautiful colors—salmon, lavender, mint, and dove gray—are laid out to reveal a swastika in the negative spaces created between them.

Odita’s critique of power is layered, imposed not only through her subtle references to history and its dark iconography, but also through the works’ internal architecture. Visually, the artist’s loaded symbols reveal recurring modular shapes—partly inspired by his study of West African textiles—that help route his abstractions away from any supposed Western origin. Odita reminds us that so-called political content can be inherent in aesthetic forms, and that painting has its own responsibilities within the structures of violence addressed in the image of a burning cross.

— Zoe Hopkins

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