Sonaya’s geography of memory and the temporal dialectic of return

Artist: Idowu Sonaya
Title: Home Coming
Medium: Charcoal on Paper
Size: 24X18
Technique: Block-in, Massing, Smudging & Lifting
Year: 2025

IDOWU Sonaya’s Home Coming is an expressive charcoal drawing on paper that transforms the seemingly simple act of returning home into a complex psychological, cultural and philosophical journey. He presents men mounted on horses in clusters to evoke the familiar visual vocabulary of equestrianism, Northern Nigerian cultural pageantry and the ceremonial splendour of the Durbar.

The drawing evokes a geography of memory: a landscape in which the past and present occupy the same psychological territory. The phrase Home Coming ordinarily carries emotional associations of reunion, security, belonging and restoration. 

Sonaya’s choice of charcoal as a medium of expression is, however, central to conceptual force of the work. This crumbly material possesses an inherent poetic vulnerability.

Unlike the permanence associated with other artistic media of expression, charcoal seems always to threaten disappearance hence the need to use the fixative material for lasting purposes.

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He uses block-in, massing, smudging and lifting to construct the images and their milieu. These methods generate a visual vocabulary of emergence and disappearance.

Massing establishes the physical authority of the horsemen, smudging dissolves the boundaries between bodies, animals and atmosphere while lifting creates an impression that appears almost like fragments of remembered light.

The paper as his support becomes a psychological three-dimensional landscape. The depiction of turbaned men riding horses introduces a powerful cultural and symbolic dimension.

The turban may signify religious devotion, cultural identity, spiritual grounding, social distinction and practical protection. His use of chiaroscuro effects strengthens the psychological intensity of the composition.

He uses his artistic skills to create movement within a static medium; the advancing horses, the riders leaning into motion, generation of rhythm by overlapping figures. 

The work possesses an impressionistic sensibility. Rather than describing every anatomical or environmental detail with artistic precision, Sonaya suggests atmosphere, gesture, tonal contrast and emotional immediacy.

The horses stood as metaphors of time. They become the vehicles of temporal contradiction. In summation, Sonaya’s Home Coming ultimately transcends the literal representation of horsemen returning to an identifiable place. It becomes a meditation on migration, memory, identity, cultural continuity, psychological displacement and the impossibility of returning unchanged. 

•Elebute is Professor of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies Resource Centre for Arts, Culture and Communication Development.