LAGOS.- Tiwani Contemporary, Lagos is presenting Ayotunde Ojo: A Life Of Its Own which references Ojo's painting process and understanding of how each painting arrives into being.
The artist states:
“The result is a painting that resists stillness. These works do not document a moment; they register duration. The room is not fixed. It adjusts, shifts, absorbs emotional residue. Figures appear anchored yet slightly unsettled, as though existing across more than one temporal plane. What is seen is both present and remembered.”
Ojo presents his domestic interiors as living, shifting spaces, altered by light, stillness and movement, subtly capturing the temporal shifts that coexist within a shared space. The paintings feel almost cinematic; compressing a series of lived experiences within the same space at different points of time, reminding us that time is never suspended but can be read as layered, infinite, visual information. The walls shift, light contradicts itself, perspectives fracture and sometimes settle momentarily on subjects and objects.
Retaining the underdrawings, Ojo references the compositional decisions that remain embedded beneath the surface, of which the canvas becomes a site of accumulation, the charcoal remains visible as a form of structural memory, and the oil and acrylic paint accumulate over these traces, sometimes clarifying, sometimes obscuring.
The exhibition reflects an awareness that life does not stand still. Relationships between lovers, friends, family and animals carry moments of closeness and potential friction. By layering multiple scenes together, Ojo introduces a quiet tension into the compositions. The home, once perceived primarily as a site of stability, becomes a space that both shelters and mirrors the instabilities of the outside world.
Artist Statement
A Life of Its Own emerges for me from a process of return, repetition, and temporal accumulation. Working from photographs taken at different moments in time, I revisit the same interior spaces, re-entering the canvas to introduce new observations, shifts in light, and evolving perspectives. The paintings do not describe a single fixed moment; instead, they hold multiple encounters within the same scene, allowing time to gather and unfold across the surface.
Figures, objects, and spaces begin to slip between moments, forming images that feel both present and remembered. The interior becomes a site of temporal layering, where past and present coexist within a single pictorial field. These are spaces of lived experience, populated by friends, family, and familiar domestic elements, couches, plants, furniture, that anchor the compositions while quietly accumulating emotional and personal weight. Through repetition and reworking, these elements begin to carry what Brenda Cooper describes as the “massive weight of little events”(1) holding traces of intimacy, duration, and everyday life.
While these interiors suggest familiarity and stillness, they are not entirely at rest. Subtle disruptions emerge: forms shift, gestures fragment, and the stability of the room becomes unsettled. What appears calm begins to hold a quiet tension, as if the space itself is absorbing and responding to something beyond it. The paintings hover between composure and disarray, allowing a low, persistent sense of unrest to surface within the ordinary.
The process itself remains central to the work. Each painting evolves over time through repeated returns, with new observations layered into earlier gestures. This method produces paintings that remain open, resisting resolution and fixed meaning. Rather than static representations, the works function as living records of perception, reflecting not only what is seen, but how seeing changes over time.
In this way, A Life of Its Own considers painting as an ongoing condition: a space where time accumulates, memory surfaces, and stillness is continually unsettled, where the painting gradually exceeds its origin and begins to take on a life of its own.
Ayotunde Ojo
(1) Brenda Cooper, A New Generation of African writers: Migration, Material Culture & Language. 2008
Ayotunde Ojo (b. 1995, Lagos) received a degree in both Fine Art and Graphic Design from the School of Art, Design and Printing, Yaba College of Technology, Lagos, Nigeria in 2018.
Primarily working within the medium of Painting, Ojo’s works capture the essence of these moments and experiences within his compositions, by representing himself or his subjects in a melancholic, tranquil solitude of lived spaces. Ojo views his paintings as self-portraits influenced by memory, the subconscious, encounters and exchange with people and his environment.
Recent exhibitions include: These Four Walls, Southern Guild Gallery. Cape Town, South Africa (solo - 2025); FOG Design + Art Fair, Southern Guild Gallery, San Francisco, USA (group - 2025); Expo Chicago, Southern Guild Gallery, Chicago, USA(group - 2025); Investec Cape Town Art Fair, Southern Guild Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa (group - 2024); Mother Tongues, Southern Guild Gallery, LA, California, USA (group - 2024); Expo Chicago, Southern Guild Gallery, Chicago, USA (group - 2024); Art Paris, Maruani Mercier Gallery, Paris, France (group - 2024); Tales for a Stranger, Maruani Mercier Gallery, Zaventem, Belgium (group - 2023); Bodies, Bodies, Bodies, Rele Gallery, Lagos, Nigeria (group - 2022); In Situ Encounters in Space, Ko Gallery, Lagos, Nigeria (group - 2022); In the moment, Dida Gallery, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire (group - 2022); Future Fair, Solo Booth, Nyama Fine Art, NY, USA (group - 2021); 36 Paintings, Harper's Books, East Hampton, NY, USA (group - 2021); Domesticity, Volery Gallery, Dubai (group - 2021).
