Paul Emenike Chibuike
To command color, texture and cultural reminiscence in a single brushstroke is to practise a type of city meditation, and that is the territory Remchi Vigs explores in his work. His rough-edged, textured canvases oscillate between the sleek and the implied, arresting the viewer with their vivid colors and dreamlike compositions.
For this rising Jos-based artist, portray is a visible diary of his fascination with Northern Nigeria’s day by day rhythms, social life and architectural heritage. His works probe what it means to inherit a cultural language that seems more and more weak to extinction.
“I choose painting because I tried other artistic mediums like sculpture, photography and film to pass my message, but all these were not invoking the feeling of satisfaction,” he explains. “It was only when I discovered I could do better with colours on canvas that I found my voice. Painting challenges my reasoning and leaves me with no option other than to think deeply. It also helps me to look at life with the inner eyes of an observer.”
His canvases conjure nobles on horseback at Durbar festivities, conventional architectural kinds, market scenes and figurative research of on a regular basis individuals. Loose traces and damaged patches of color typically depart these photographs suspended between recognition and abstraction, lending them an virtually dreamlike high quality.
Jos, the place Vigs lives and works, gives a lot of his inspiration. Its cosmopolitan character, formed by the intermingling of indigenous communities and migrant populations, is mirrored in town’s social and cultural life. Historically related to tin mining and agricultural commerce, Jos has additionally endured recurrent ethno-religious conflicts which have sophisticated its public picture. Yet its creative group continues to discover extra restorative methods of representing town and its identification.
From the Society of Nigerian Artists (Jos Chapter) and The Enchanting Plateau Art Exhibition to unbiased galleries corresponding to Juneth Galleria, Padma Art Gallery and Ecstasy Art Gallery, town has sustained areas for creative change. More just lately, JOISCOLD Art Foundation, championed by curator and archivist Ponchang Kumven, has promoted collective engagement with the Plateau’s ecology, histories and indigenous information as sources of modern creative inquiry.
It is inside this evolving atmosphere that Vigs belongs to a era looking for to reimagine Jos by way of the interaction of reminiscence, structure and cultural identification.
A graduate of Fine and Applied Arts from the University of Jos, the place he developed pursuits in drawing, combined media and mural portray, Vigs acknowledges the affect of a number of artists, amongst them John Oyedemi, Jacob Onoja, Ezra Samu’ila, Ogiugo Edosa and Bolaji Ogunwo. Their contributions, he says, have formed his type, palette, self-discipline and relationships throughout the artwork group.
His skilled expertise contains mural and portrait commissions, workshops and exhibitions in Nigeria and overseas. These embrace the Nigerian–Benin Republic Border Art for Economic Development Residency in Idi-Iroko, Ogun State; Zanzalu Art Residency in Zanzibar; Life in My City Arts Festival (LIMCAF), Enugu (2024); Cultural Canvas Art Exhibition, Abuja (2025); and Swahili Futurism Art Exhibition, Zanzibar (2026).
He was additionally an general finalist in the NIPSS Blue Economy Art Competition and acquired the University of Jos SUG House of Parliament Visual Artist of the Year Award.
His creative pursuits have progressively moved from the ceremonial imagery of Northern Nigeria’s Durbar festivals in direction of the structure of historic African settlements and historic cities. He sees structure not merely as bodily constructions however as repositories of identification, historical past and collective reminiscence. His work consequently look at how inherited designs have formed modern city growth and would possibly inform the cities of the long run.
This strategy finds a placing expression in Jos Terminus: Abuja Market (2024), an acrylic-on-canvas portray dominated by a tempered purple backdrop. Wavy traces sweep rhythmically throughout its skyline, tinted by a receding sundown whose faint yellow glow falls over the bustling market. Beneath it, umbrellas and corrugated roofs shelter a shifting multitude of market-goers. Their hurried, virtually summary figures dissolve into the colorful floor, capturing one thing of the stressed power of on a regular basis city life.
Equally compelling is Riding Off (2026), an oil portray depicting a procession of Northern horsemen in Durbar ceremonial regalia, seemingly rising from Riyom Rock, the well-known Plateau landmark. Red spills into umber, burgundy and soot-like yellow, evoking the dusty environment of harmattan or the warmth of a sun-drenched afternoon. The horses, loosely rendered in each brushwork and type, nonetheless retain a commanding majesty and palpable sense of motion.
Two riders dominate the foreground, dressed in purple and brown robes, their heads wrapped in turbans. Behind them trails a vibrant procession. The figures, directly recognisable and distorted, seem to advance in direction of the viewer. Beyond its celebration of the Durbar, the portray suggests a dialogue between Northern ceremonial traditions and Jos’s personal cultural identification. Its visible drama lies in this assembly of histories, colors and cultural references.
Vigs calls his strategy Archival Futurism, describing it as “an artistic approach that reimagines ancestral architecture and historical urban spaces as living archives, using their visual memory, cultural knowledge and structural language to reflect on contemporary and future cityscapes.”
The formulation captures the preoccupation working by way of his work: the preservation of indigenous heritage with out treating it as one thing sealed off from modern life. By bringing architectural reminiscence into dialog with present-day city expertise, Vigs makes an attempt to get better the visible histories that may in any other case slip from collective consciousness.
His work thus change into greater than observations of Jos and Northern Nigeria. They are makes an attempt to recollect, reinterpret and picture their cultural landscapes anew. In their shifting colors and stressed kinds, town emerges as each an inherited reminiscence and an unfinished chance.
