Jadé Fadojutimi: Can we see the colour green because we have a name for it? at The Hepworth, Wakefield, UK
Jadé Fadojutimi often cites Japan as a major influence on her large-scale works that radiate with colour and energy where sweeping, confident brush strokes stretch from one edge of the canvas to the other. She has travelled there multiple times since 2016. She notes that she is “still trying to understand what that is” that draws her and leaves her feeling more inspired than before.[1] The exact influence on her work is clearly very internal, a personal soothing intuition but this magnetism is hinted at where she seems to be rummaging through the elements on her canvas, searching for something just out of reach. Something most people do daily in their bag or coat pockets. With Fadojutimi it’s not so much what is being noticed but why it’s being noticed at all.
JADÉ FADOJUTIMI, The Empress of the Plants, 2022. 300 x 800 cm, Acrylic, oil and oil pastels on canvas. Photo: Michael Brzezinski. Courtesy: Jadé Fadojutimi
One monumental piece almost envelops the wall, in Empress of the Plants, she conjures a heavenly landscape depicting familiar but abstracted features of the natural world. Alluding to layers of vegetation, a horizon or a gigantic primeval creature, these elements express a mental state rather than defining anything specific. This layered ‘foliage’ is reminiscent of Monet whose paintings of nature were unpressured and unfixed in their depiction. Both artists have made odes to nature and the vitality that seeps out from it. Similarly in A Permeable Existence, dark spiralling mauve and blue lines trail across patches of white and pale pink, reminiscence of rock pools with their treasures blanketed by aqueousness. Other works feel like you’re standing in front of a stained-glass window, as if a light box is just behind which reveals more detail between pools of light. These pools illuminate Fadojutimi’s compositional mastery, suggestions of microbes, algae and bacteria, a petri dish of forms that bring you back to biology lessons and battered microscopes, futuristic and prehistoric at the same time. Something a viewer would recognise as much deeper and older than just abstract structures.
A Permeable Existence, 2022. 190 x 170 cm, Acrylic, oil and oil pastels on canvas. Photo: Michael Brzezinski. Courtesy: Jadé Fadojutimi
Fadojutimi works primarily at night while during the day, her assistants come to harvest the fruit and prepare her studio for the next. To prefer to work when the sun is down when effectively everyone else is asleep is a dedicated choice. Anyone who’s ever worked night shifts will understand the paradoxical feeling of being awake and working at witching hour, both strange and lonely but also stolen time. It prompts a sense of truthfulness as if being hidden from daylight might equal loss of one’s inhibitions and so less judgement and more freedom. For Fadojutimi it provides the focus and safety needed to unleash her raw energy and emotion onto the canvas which feels a privilege to be able to witness.
[1] Hepworth Wakefield. 2022. Jadé Fadojutimi: Can we see the colour green because we have a name for it?. (https://hepworthwakefield.org/whats-on/jade-fadojutimi/)