Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Compcros
Comparative Cognitive1 Processes and Systems
“Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge”
Uli Philosophy and Mysticism
Compcros
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
“Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge”
2
Between Line and Cosmos
A Story of Origins
The body is the house of the self, yet without the house would the self exist?
The art of Uli was born in this tension between the house and its dweller, the
visible and the invisible, spaces negative and spaces positive, the line and the
abstractions it projects, the empty and the full.
5
Detail of Victor Ekpuk’s Good Morning, Sunrise
6
Obiora Udechukwu’s Our Journey
The unfolding spiral navigates and unifies space, space constituted by various
zones conjoined through the motion of the unfolding form as it traverses
configurations neither terrestrial nor celestial, existing at the intersection of
imagination and concreteness, resonating, within the expansive kaleidoscope
of colour and abstract figurations, with solar systems and galaxies, with the
efforts of the mind to construct islands of order, of understanding, within the
tantalizing infinity of the unknown.
7
Joseph Eze’s Contemporary Uli Series No. 4 : Udude ( Spider)
8
Joseph Eze’s Contemporary Uli Series No. 4 : Udude ( Spider)
Joseph Eze’s Contemporary Uli Series No. 4 : Udude ( Spider), may be perceived,
within the context of Uli philosophy and mysticism, as evoking responses to
these questions.
9
“Beauty is a road to inwardness, a straight line drawn by God,” the Uli mystic
may declare, as the beautiful face of Eze’s painting amplifies the visual
rhythms of the painting’s human and non-human configurations.
A Meditation on Patterns
The exploration of the intersection between art and life in terms of the
presence of varied forms of beauty in all aspects of existence, from mud to the
dirty water of gutters to falling rain to strangers passing in the street to the
radiance of the rising sun to the palpitations of life in the deep green of leaves,
this is the pursuit of the Uli thinker.
The Uli mystic may contemplate the rhythms that make up the contours of the
tree, the shaping and reshaping of clouds, the ripples of the stream, the
patterns of the water in a bowl, always seeking to penetrate, through
sensitivity to the beauty of lines in their myriad shapings of possibility, to the
dynamic essence from which the various actualizations of being arise.
What is the nature of the line that stretches from the patterns of the leaf to its
branches, to its trunk, to its roots, emanation of the life force generated by the
meeting of earth and sun that is the tree?
10
The pool of rain water on the road mirroring the immensity of the sky, the
ocean in its relationship to waters great and small, what are the conjunctions
between these lines of vision and the relationship between self and cosmos?
To the Uli mystic, the universe is a concourse of doors leading into infinity.
From time to time, the Uli mystic returns to that emptiness, to the point
between the nothingness before being and the emergence of all, between the
potential of every moment and the expression of that potential, in meditation
or prayer drawing vitalizing water from the well at the roots of time.
A powerful darkness.
11