“A face in a phase”, Maduka’s poetry of portraiture

The photographer stands in a museum corridor, a few steps from a white wall and a tiled floor. He wears a deep-blue kaftan with three buttons at the chest, matching trousers, and black sandals. His body angles slightly toward the camera; his left hand rests at his side, his right hand gives a thumbs-up. Behind him, filling almost the whole frame, a large photograph dominates: an intensely worked face, frontally posed, its surface layered with thick, rocklike planes of textured colour.

On the wall hangs a photograph of a monumental portrait, nearly touching the edges of the canvas. The face is strictly frontal, eyes set level with the viewers, the gaze steady rather than theatrical. The skin colour is thick—ridges and slabs that look troweled on with a knife. You can almost read the rhythm of the maker’s hand in every plane: striations that climb the brow, chisel-like facets across the bridge of the nose, torn edges where one color is dragged over another and leaves a serrated seam.

Deep ultramarine and phthalo blues pool around the temples, eyelids, and jaw; across the cheekbones and nose the surface breaks into cadmium orange, vermilion, and burnt sienna, with occasional chalky flecks of light that splinter like crystal. The lips hold a denser red, glazed just enough to catch a small, wet highlight. The nostrils are carved dark, almost architectural. Around the periphery the portrait softens into an unsettled ground—cool greys and sea-blues that behave like weather. Edges are lost and found: hairline bleeds into the canvas edge, cheekbone cut sharp, chin softened. Despite the weight of pigment, the face feels breathing and immediate, as if condensing out of a cloud.

This fine art photography is Chidozie Maduka’s visual expression of poetry, with the exhibition title “Phase of Life” held at the Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art, Pan-Atlantic University on October 15th 2023, Maduka presents us with a “face in a phase”. This portrait is a geology of a person. Instead of chasing likeness through smoothness, it builds identity by accumulation—strokes on strokes, layer upon layer—so that time becomes visible as matter. The blue–orange opposition is classic, but here it is biographical rather than decorative, water meeting fire, night pressed against day. Warm plates flare where life meets the world—brow, cheek, lip—while cooler blues settle in hollows. The picture becomes a thermodynamic map of a face: heat where the self is asserted, cool where it withdraws.

In this composition a vertical axis holds the head upright; the triangle of eyes and mouth anchors the center. But symmetry is continually fractured by the knife-mark effects. The eyes refuse melodrama. There is no pleading, no bombast, simply a sovereign steadiness. In a genre that often drifts toward spectacle—either the hyper-polished photo-finish or the theatrical grimace—this photograph keeps its temperature. It asks the viewer to do the work of looking: to move from color to plane to depth until a person steps forward.

Seen inside an exhibition titled “Phase of Life,” the surface becomes a metaphor. Each ridge is a stratum of experience; each scumble a moment revised; each scraped line a refusal. The background’s unsettled weather hints that identity is not a finished picture but a system in motion. The portrait thus participates in a strong current of contemporary African portraiture that resists the flattening gaze: surface as resistance, texture as testimony.

There is also a silent idiom of expression, many portraits aspire to photographic realism; this one insists on paint’s truth—its thickness, its drag, its refusal to disappear. It says: a face is not just seen; it is made—by time, by labor, by the pressure of looking and being looked at.

The work stands knowingly between two poles often seen in West African portraiture now: hyperreal finish and expressionist gesture. By refusing polish and embracing matter, it aligns with a lineage that treats the face as topography—more landform than mirror. The result is a portrait that reads as individual and collective: a singular person, but also a field on which urban light, harmattan dust, sweat, and memory have left deposits. It is a Lagos face, yes, but also a continental face; the weather of history sits on the skin.

The face becomes a shoreline: blue pulls back, orange arrives. You could read it with your fingers, counting years in ridges. Light breaks on the forehead like something remembered too late. The eyes don’t ask; they hold. Around the head, the weather can’t decide—storm or clearing. If you wait, the paint quiets and a person steps out, unhurried.

Maduka’s portrait is excavated rather than depicted. It uses scale, symmetry, and a disciplined blue–orange argument to insist on presence, then lets texture carry history. The eyes steady the room; the colour does the speaking. In the terms promised by Phase of Life, the picture is faithful: it shows a life not as a single likeness but as layers laid down over time, compacted into a face that looks back and will not look away.

A commanding, materially confident portrait that embodies the exhibition’s theme by turning time into substance. Its presence is undeniable; its risk is familiarity. With greater modulation (color, thickness, specificity), it would move from “arresting” to “necessary,” carrying not only the heat of expression but the cool precision of close observation.

By Ozolua Uhakheme