Published by Daily Trust, this critique by Okechukwu Uwaezuoke examines Lateefat Tobun's Atona, Guiding Lightthrough the familiar experience and memory of the household lantern.
Uwaezuoke considers the lantern's dominant position within the composition alongside its restrained amber glow, surrounded by grey, charcoal black and muted green. Rather than reading the light as a conventional symbol of rescue or hope, he interprets it as a form of orientation, connected to the ordinary ways people learned to live with uncertainty and interrupted electricity.
The critique also examines the painting's relationship with memory. Its loosely defined surroundings leave the lantern without a recognisable room, allowing atmosphere, sensation and the remembered object to take precedence over precise details of place. In this reading, the lantern becomes something recalled rather than simply observed.
Uwaezuoke identifies restraint as one of the work's strongest decisions, particularly its refusal to romanticise the lantern or overload it with symbolism. His analysis also addresses areas he considers less resolved, including passages in the lower background where the looseness of the brushwork comes close to weakening the composition.
Ultimately, the critique reads Atona, Guiding Light as an examination of ordinary endurance rather than a simple painting about illumination. The work finds significance in repeated acts of adaptation and in the way an everyday object can later become a carrier of memory.
