Jadé Fadojutimi

Fadojutimi’s vibrant visual language shifts between abstract gestures and repeated forms or motifs, that bear personal references, at times hinted at in her titles but barely decipherable by the viewer. Her process provides the artist with a vehicle to navigate through an emotional landscape in a quest for self-knowledge. She has described her paintings as ‘windows’ that capture her own reflection seeping through their surface. I Present Your Royal Highness marks a shift in her work, being one of the first paintings in which she explores new characters that lean more heavily towards figuration. The artist has explained:

although these figures might not have been visible to others, they were becoming recognisable and familiar to me and this bothered me. Whilst fighting against this development, I began to realise I could not reject the natural progression my paintings were taking. I decided to embrace these characters and give them centre stage … [this] was one of the first paintings from this new body of work and consequently it is special to me. During this time, I made a forcible attempt to destroy this sense of familiarity in my visual language alongside the working habits I had developed. I had become frustrated with my use of colour and tried to escape this by pouring copious amounts of pinks, reds and browns into tins and mixed them to open things up … This outpouring of paint literally gave the work a rich sense of what I like to call ‘orchestrated randomness’. I had no idea how the paint would converse with itself on the canvas, yet by guiding its movement, the work blossomed into a composition. An experimental outburst presented itself as a painting, a character and a state of mind.
(Conversation with Tate curator Sofia Karamani, 22 March 2019.)

Fadojutimi uses writing to guide and reflect her painting practice. .Like her paintings, her writing is often emotive, drawing on poetry and allusion to expand ideas and images into unexpected or unrecognisable forms.

I Present Your Royal Highness was included in the artist’s third solo exhibition, at PEER, London in 2019.

Further reading
Jadé Fadojutimi: She Squalls, exhibition catalogue, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne 2019.

Sofia Karamani
April 2019