'We are all colours that are constantly fluctuating, we change every day, we change every minute, and it was a wonderful thing to think about in terms of why these paintings feel so different to me all the time, because I am constantly changing, and the colours I am experiencing are constantly changing.' —Jadé FadojutimiDriven by unseen elemental forces, young British artist Jadé Fadojutimi’s A Cropped Perspective of This Whirlwind Effect unfolds in a rush of dynamic colour, the deep vitality of its broad sweeps of green stunningly representative of the artist’s highly attuned sensitivity to rhythm and colour. At just 28 years old, Fadojutimi has the distinction of being the youngest artist to be included in the Tate Gallery’s permanent collection and has been awarded numerous solo exhibitions in recent years. A leading voice in contemporary abstraction, her more recent paintings nevertheless gravitate around a pull towards figuration that the artist manages with incredible dexterity and finesse. Executed in 2020, A Cropped Perspective of This Whirlwind Effect highlights the new, graphic character that Fadojutimi’s work has taken on in more recent years, introducing oil stick alongside paint in order to create a complex exchange between painterly depth and surface detail.

 

Dreaming in Colour

 

As Fadojutimi eloquently describes colour - and its intersections with ‘texture, line, form, composition, rhythm, marks, and disturbances’ - occupies the very heart of her artistic project. This chromatic sensitivity is powerfully demonstrated in A Cropped Perspective of This Whirlwind Effect, where the rich, jungle-greens and intense luminosity of the large-scale work combine to create a multi-layered, immersive surface. Possessing a sense of vitality that evokes organic imagery of plants bursting into life, photosynthesising chloroplasts, and shifting underwater worlds, the dramatic intensity of Fadojutimi’s execution and the vibrantly pearlescent qualities of her paint pulse with a personality and unparalleled energy, giving weight to Fadojutimi’s assertion that ‘identity can be translated through colour.’ⁱ The visual equivalence to certain plant structure structures is illuminating in its own way too, the close organic relationship between colour and light referencing Fadojutimi’s recent experiments with neon pigments as a way of harnessing their distinctive sharpness and to move her painting into ‘a different kind of spectrum of light.’ⁱⁱ

 

Built up in translucent layers of iridescent paint, A Cropped Perspective of This Whirlwind Effect is a highly characteristic of Fadojutimi’s experiments with Liquin, a quick-drying agent that gives her oils their characteristic high, hard sheen. As eminent art critic Jennifer Higgie has described, this technical approach ‘results in pictures whose surface recall panes of glass or fast-moving water. Shifting, reflective, impatient.’ⁱⁱⁱ

 

Jewel-like in their crystalline brilliance these paintings adopt the fractured, shifting surfaces of stained glass, appropriate given the conceptual importance that Fadojutimi places on windows throughout her painting and writing. At once opaque and transparent, stained glass is an especially powerful visual and symbolic device, physically separating us from our environment, but blending inside and outside, the self and the space around it. Capturing the strange experience of seeing our reflection superimposed on the environment beyond the glass, the artist conceives of her paintings like windows, ‘reflections of myself and the objects I surround myself with.’^iv Irrevocably intwined and mutually evolving, Fadojutimi establishes a profound sense of symbiosis between her and her works that verges towards the spiritual dimensions of Wassily Kandinsky’s lyrical chromatic abstractions. Notably, Kandinsky created more than 70 reverse paintings on glass, as well as numerous designs for stained glass windows, his 1911 Improvisation No. 19 capturing offering a fascinating visual touchstone for the remarkable fluidity in the present work.

 

Often working through the night to loud, cinematic soundtracks in her South London studio, Fadojuitmi uses her whole body as she paints, working in compulsive bursts of energy as she translates memories, emotions, and sensations onto her large-scale canvases. As the artist details: ‘I feel like painting involves the body so much, when I am making my works I paint by touch, and I feel like if I am not loose, if I can’t even move, how can you paint? I have to jump sometimes to reach my paintings, and sometimes I think, do I want to jump or do I want to leap? Dancing is a big part of how I am in the studio.’^v

 

In its rhythmic intensity, energetic immediacy, and finely tuned graphic sensibility Fadojutimi’s painting is often compared to great American post-war painters Willem de Kooning and Lee Krasner. While these elements can all be discerned in the present work, in Fadojutimi’s privileging of colour and gesture here A Cropped Perspective of This Whirlwind Effect also brings to mind the energy and mood of Abstract Expressionist Mary Abbot. Visually recalling Abbot’s highly attuned sensitivity to nature and her environment, the deep green palette and physical presence of A Cropped Perspective of This Whirlwind Effect recalls the lush density of Mary Abbot’s immersive emotional landscapes.

 

 

Collector’s Digest

 

•    At just 28 years old, Jadé Fadojutimi is the youngest artist to be represented in the Tate’s permanent collection. A graduate of the Slade School and the Royal College of Art in London, her work is also included in major international collections including the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Hepworth Wakefield.

 

•    After her first institutional show at Peer, London in 2019, Fadojutimi has gone on to present work in a series of key locations. Recent exhibitions include her American institutional debut at the Miami Institute for Contemporary Art, and the upcoming presentation of works at the Hepworth Wakefield and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin later this year.

 

•    Presented at Phillips London last October, Myths of Pleasure represents the highest price achieved for Fadojutimi’s work at auction

 

Jadé Fadojutimi, Studio visit ahead of the Liverpool Biennale in 2021.

ⁱ Jadé Fadojutimi quoted in: David Trigg, ‘Jadé Fadojutimi Interview’, Studio International, 26 April 2021. 
ⁱⁱ Jadé Fadojutimi, ‘Studio Visit:Jadé Fadojutimi’, filmed for the Liverpool Biennial 
ⁱⁱⁱ Jennifer Higgie in Jadé Fadojutimi: Jesture (exh.cat)., London, Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, 2020, p. 11. 
^iv Jadé Fadojutimi Tate short, 2020, online
^v Jadé Fadojutimi, quoted in ‘Jadé Fadojutimi: Sensation of the Sublime’,  Twin, 7 May 2021, online.