Writing (and reading) about Wosene’s work seems almost the wrong thing to do because he paints to captivate our eyes with visions such as we have never imagined. And that’s the point. Learning about Wosene’s background as an artist is good because it tells us how life has shaped him and conditioned his artistic motivations. But what he paints is the language he gives us to read, generously filling our eyes with an endless sensorium of colors, forms, motion and emotion conjured through a process he describes as “inchoate and exploratory, an interplay of accident and intention, of curiosity and discovery.” [1]

Follow his hand across the canvas from edge to edge, corner to corner. Enigmatic shapes, shadowy images, even Amharic letters appear and dissipate in spaces that bend and morph while intricate touches of color and pattern glimmer on or just below the surface. Interactions occur everywhere we look, and the edges are just as involved as the center. Your eye can sense forces at play and then react to surprising adjacencies and collisions that result from the artist testing how the colors will mix and compare. Like a jazz musician and master of improvisation, when he starts applying paint, his canvas becomes a space of new encounters, an uncharted journey propelled by an adventurous eye and spirited mind.

Once he works a painting through, could he find where he started? Is the beginning still there (recognizable where it was)? Like Coltrane’s first notes that modulate in memory as the performance moves, Wosene’s initial strokes are transformed as he weaves his labyrinthine compositions more and more intricately, trying out fresh impulses, intensifying the magic. Where did it start? Does it end?

Engaging in these new worlds you’ve never seen before will take you far from your everyday. To speak, his paintings do not need our words, just our eyes.

I want to give thanks to the divine
Labyrinth of causes and effects
For the diversity of beings
That form this singular universe . . .
For the fact that the poem is inexhaustible
And becomes one with the sum of all created things
And will never reach its last verse
And varies according to its writers . . .

 – Jorge Luis Borges
  excerpst from Another Poem of Gifts
translated by Alan Dugan[2]

[1] Excerpt from “Life as a Canvas” by Wosene Worke Kosrof, in AGNI 89 (2019) 131.
[2] Norman Thomas Di Giovanni, ed., Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems 1923-1967 (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1972), p. 219.