Art Basel Miami Beach

Chino Amobi (b. 1984, Tuscaloosa, Alabama) creates worlds. An American artist of Nigerian descent, Amobi’s total installations crack open the door to an alternate universe: a place where everything is at once strange and familiar, where reality disconnects and beings dissolve; bridging painting, literature, electronic music and film with experimental ease.

Amobi’s newest video work Age of Excess anchors the presentation within a domestic stage, surrounded by a series of his latest vibrating still life paintings: an invitation to embark on a cosmic journey. The installation unfolds as a cinematic Gesamtkunstwerk of the EROICA universe, based on the artist’s first novel written in the style of the cyberpunk genre, with references to historical nonfiction, folklore, and urban fiction. The book opens with a report of Onticide: a state of non-existence beyond subjectivity, popularised by the Afro-pessimist thinker Calvin L. Warren. The artist’s alter ego seems to have left behind the torments of individualism to commune with the elements and shed certain beliefs to reach a higher exalted state. To be fully reborn, he had to die. Only then could he abandon inherited certainties and liberate himself from restrictive Western vantage point.

In Age of Excess, Amobi montages archival clips from old Hollywood films, synchronised to an electronic sound composition. The piece takes Mark Fischer’s concept of “hauntology” in twenty-first century cultural production, wherein the artwork of the past is worn as a mask and the “disappearance of the future mean[s] the deterioration of a whole mode of social imagination: the capacity to conceive of a world radically different than the one in which we currently live.” The film breaks the spells the paintings seek to conjure, as the logic of science fiction and world building fold back on themselves as a historical mode of imagining.

By synthesising strategies drawn from film, literature, contemporary music, and art, Amobi opens the aperture of what is at stake in how modes of conceiving the future and past are constructed and employed. Age of Excess provokes a voracious forward and backward looking. A sudden dissociation from the symbols and structures we have stood upon gives way to the disintegration of the present. In this space of groundlessness, spectres emerge.

As a continuation of his research, Amobi’s new body of paintings explore the various ontological relationships between nature and history. Highly rendered floral portraits merge with digital luminescence, placing nature within a non- tangible system.

Traditionally a symbol of morality, religion, or erotism, the plant now arrays the speculation of beauty, offering another level of visual perception to the Kantian naturalist lawfulness. If the flowers seem isolated in this black abyssal atmosphere, Amobi instills them with an almost animist power. Here, nature is no longer trapped in a rigid human classification system, but assumes its own diffusing vitality pollinated by the spirit of a totemic hummingbird.