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Quixotic

Genius Loci, Ludwigshafen, Germany
Twilight Contemporary, London

Inspired by Miguel de Cervantes legendary 1605 novel Don Quixote, Onwochei-Garcia’s large-scale, immersive paper painting installations explore the clash of chaos and idealism and the dissonance that arises from one’s ordered expectations of the world and its anarchic, often tumultuous reality.

In the novel, an aging man becomes infatuated by the enchanted visions of chivalric fantasy in the books that he avidly reads. He decides that he will become a knight-errant, embarking on a fantastical quest through 17th century Spain. Don Quixote’s world is an absurd one. He refuses to engage with reality; choosing instead to re-create the world within his mind and transform the banal, quotidian aspects of life into grand, fantastical illusions. For Onwochei-Garcia, Don Quixote’s strange, mirage-warped outlook on the world provides a unique way of interrogating and dissecting our observable reality. In Onwochei-Garcia’s huge paintings, the presence of mythological figures, grotesque forms and shifting, blurring perspectives serves to peel back the opaque, flimsy veneer of linearity, control and objectivity to reveal fragmentation and unpredictable chaos.

In Quixotic, Onwochei-Garcia uses installation to create a disorienting, fabricated reality of distorted apparitions, as if the viewer is looking out through the eyes of Don Quixote himself. Throughout the exhibition, Onwochei-Garcia’s large-scale paper paintings are draped and hung from the walls and the ceiling; generating an architecture of painting that invites the viewer to enter. These soft, sprawling structures serve to create enclosing, claustrophobic spaces that submerge the viewer in the alternate, dreamlike un-reality of the paintings. For the viewer, a stable, reassuring sense of orientation is forever out of reach as Onwochei-Garcia’s works cannot be viewed on a traditional, flat-plain. Instead, the landscapes and human forms depicted within the work bend and warp with the natural flow of the paper as it cascades down to the floor. This results in compositions in which the secure, grounding nature of linear perspective is utterly dashed; destabilising the viewer’s grasp on their relation to each painting even further.

Onwochei-Garcia’s paper paintings are multifaceted; their dynamic, sculptural suspension in the gallery space invites the viewer to delve into them and fully explore their two sides. On the first side, Onwochei-Garcia’s mysterious, clashing figures are exquisitely rendered and suffused in soft, mottled colour. On the second side, the mirror image of the first, figures are abstracted and presented in sketchy silhouettes and gestural, stripped-back forms that are more akin to glyphs or symbols.

In many of her works, Onwochei-Garcia depicts riotous, frenzied scenes of disarray and confusion featuring a multitude of animal and human forms. In one composition, various arms and legs punch and kick out violently, distorted faces are pulled into gnarled grimaces and horses stampede and rear up in terror. In the fury of kinetic motion, each individual form loses its separateness and individuality as its boundaries and physical limits are totally obliterated; culminating in a thronging, tangled mass of aberrant human and animal forms. As the viewer steps back from the installation, this turbulent amalgamation of separate parts transforms into a single, monstrous chimera; a grotesque visual manifestation of the chaos and disorder of the world.

Text by Jamie Hope

2024
At Court, tempera and pastel on washi 239.7 x 199cm
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Las Dulcineas, tempera and pastel on washi 239.7 x 78 cm
Chaos, tempera on washi 129 x 129.5
¡Pija!, pastel on paper 76 x 56 cm
¡Ayyy!, pastel on paper 76 x 56 cm
¡Mira!, pastel on paper 76 x 56 cm