PEER presents The Numbing Vibrancy of Characters in Play, new paintings by Jadé Fadojutimi in her first solo exhibition in a UK public institution, including large-scale works specially created for the gallery’s street-facing space. Fadojutimi is a young artist who has developed a vibrant and distinctive language of painting that fluctuates between abstract gesture and repeated forms or motifs that seem to exist on the very edge of graphic description. For her, the stretched canvas provides a physical space onto and into which she can enact a variety of scenarios where the material of the paint itself has the power to assume a vast range of identities. The artist’s recent work has captured scenes of ‘familiar unfamiliarity’, where distant places and foliage bleed in and out of abstraction, with the paintings naturally relating and reacting to each other. Writing plays a large part in Fadojutimi’s creative process, sometimes as a way to articulate abstract thought about the complexity of her practice, and sometimes in parallel to her painting where words take on multiple lyrical or poetic meanings. Like her paintings, the writing is often highly charged, unrestrained and revealing of raw emotion. Fadojutimi likens her painting to gazing out of a window, the surface is both transparent – looking outward, and reflective – in which she sees herself fused into and part of her environment. Fadojutimi’s painting and writing often happens in tandem, and usually late into the night, in extended bursts of activity accompanied by music, primarily soundtracks to films or sophisticated computer games. These lyric-less soundscapes create the perfect conditions in which the studio is transformed into a world for the production of the works, a process that is at once compulsive, playful, exhausting and exhilarating. Fadojutimi cites significant women abstract artists such as Amy Sillman, Varda Caivano, Nicola Tyson, and Phoebe Unwin as influences on her practice. She has also been fascinated with Japanese anime from a very young age, and a recent residency in Japan led to a direct engagement with its popular culture, and artists such as Makiko Kudo. Jadé Fadojutimi received her BA from Slade School of Fine Art in 2016 and her MA from Royal College of Art (RCA) in 2017. Whilst at the RCA she was awarded the Hine Painting Prize 2017. She is represented by Pippy Houldsworth Gallery in London and Galerie Gisela Capitain in Cologne.
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