Past, Present and Future: Taye, Kehinde and Idowu

Past, Present and Future: Taye, Kehinde and Idowu

2020 has been an eventful year.

We will not itemize the list of the horrors of the year.

Can we, instead, highlight the blessings?

Rather than explore the sadness of the year, can we paint images that are sweet?

Can we find the joy hidden behind the sorrow?

Can we squeeze order out of the chaos?

Can we weave hope from the threads of despair?

Can we use painting to redefine time and space?

Time, as this painting shows,

is a careful arrangement of the past,

present and future in a colorful order.

Space as this painting shows

becomes an organized

pattern of basic shapes.

The painting defines time

as the circle, rectangle and triangle,

representing present, past and future.

The painting speaks in trinary ways

consisting of the unitary system

and the binary procedure.

In the Yoruba idea, this trinary order

consists of Taye, Kehinde and Idowu

within a single family.

Taye and Kehinde, the twins,

are the binary set of that family.

Idowu, the child following the twins,

completes the trinary code

of that single family.

Both modes of the trinary and the binary

operate within a unitary system.

From these combinations, the painting resolves chaos.

by pulling out a victory from the jaws of collapse.

A new world emerges.

It is a world of rainbow colors

featuring intriguing symbolic shapes

indicating a restructured past, present and future.

Which of these three shapes is the past?

Which is the present?

Which is the future?

The painting redefines space

as home, journey and diaspora,

depicted as circle, triangle and rectangle.

Which of these three primary colors is the home?

Which is the journey?

Which is the diaspora?

With your eyes

travel through time and space

to and fro the painting.