Annabelle Agbo Godeau’s oil paintings feature contemporary and occasionally almost timeless motifs, captured using traditional painterly means. Their objectivity allows viewers to (re)cognize what is depicted—a figure, an activity, perhaps even a specific moment, a concrete source. The material Agbo Godeau cites in her work spans archival documents, film stills, photographs of her surroundings, and driftwood culled from the flood of digital images. And yet, as the artist emphasizes, the provenance of these materials is not of primary importance, but just one of several levels of meaning. At the same time, or perhaps due to this, these everyday and seemingly almost incidental scenes assert their visual value and their own relevance.
While the elements have been detached from their background and translated into fragments, they do not appear without context. More than just snapshots, the situations they depict have a strongly narrative, sequential, and temporal aspect that implies a before and an after: an archer drawing her bow, a cigarette stubbed out in a screw cap, a tightly coiled snake on the point of devouring itself. These images are presented as isolated details, allowing for both an abstraction and distancing from the original images and a detailed description and examination of the subjects they depict. The edges of the unframed canvases document the successive layers of paint applied one after the other—the process of gradually building up and working through a composition. Agbo Godeau’s paintings do not limit themselves to one particular substrate or mode of presentation. In this case, their small formats suggest movement; they retain a certain openness, storing completed processes of transfer while holding the potential for future links and connections.
– Clara Maria Blasius
Photo: Cedric Mussano