“While I’m painting, the harmonious unity of my senses becomes apparent. They muddle together, chitter-chattering about their newfound warmth as though it’s their first connection.”
—Jadé Fadojutimi
One of Britain’s most promising and accomplished young artists, Jadé Fadojutimi creates vast and immersive compositions in vividly realised colour. Shifting rapidly between abstraction and moments of figuration, these paintings chart complex and stunningly beautiful ‘emotional landscapes’. Created in a burst of spontaneous, creative outpouring, her works thrum with a personality and vitality all of their own, their surfaces wonderfully alive like reflections caught in shifting water. Completed in 2018 and conceived as a sister piece to Bark - also offered concurrently as a highlight of our Day Sale - this sense of familial relationship and dialogue established between Fadojutimi’s works is especially pronounced in the present work, where the certain brilliant hues, forms, and gestural marks from the earlier composition repeat and respond like the alternating patterns of an antiphonal musical arrangement. Illuminating the astonishing maturity of her pictorial language, in placing these two works directly in dialogue with one another we might not only trace the development of her practice in fascinating ways, but also appreciate the profound consistency and focus of her creative vision.
The Primacy of Colour
Standing in front of her paintings, it is easy to understand the singular importance that Fadojutimi places on colour. A vehicle for emotion, iridescent hues activate her muscular sense of line, producing bold, rhythmic compositions that pulsate with dramatic intensity. Complimenting each other in tone and scale, pearlescent hues of soft pinks, deep purples and lighter blues accented with bursts of yellow are exchanged between these two canvases, building to a crescendo in Beneath the Petticoat. Showcasing Fadojutimi’s deepening command of the gestural mark and her harnessing of colour as a vividly expressive tool, the same gentle tones used in the calmer and more contemplative Bark are here activated, brought into vibrant life to ‘bloom, recede, [and] flare up in tangled tones’ across the canvas.i
Conjuring images of the billowing layers of lace and light cottons evoked by the title, the centrifugal force of the composition is energised by Fadojutimi’s confident and direct handling, the entire surface here moving with a liquid iridescence, forms emerging and shifting before our eyes. Thinning her paints with the quick-drying agent Liquin, Fadojutimi is able to move her paint quickly and lightly across the canvas, building up her composition in layers - a pictorial syntax of dramatic sweeps of colour counterpointed by wandering, calligraphic lines, and bursts of more textured concentrations of pigment that draw on a language of gestural abstraction best captured in the work of Abstract Expressionists Joan Mitchell and Lee Krasner. The latter’s bold combination of vivid colour contrasts brought together in dynamic tension in her canvas and collages feels especially resonant here, underscoring Fadojutimi’s reputation as a leading voice in contemporary abstraction.
Working through formal, emotional, and sensorial elements in the process of their rapid execution, Fadojutimi’s paintings respond intuitively to memory, music, and feeling, placing an investigation of the complexities of lived experience and an investigation of identity at the heart of her project. Drawing together expressions of these more immaterial sensations with a profound sense of her being within her immediate surroundings, Fadojutimi’s compositions create their own emotional environments: as the artist herself suggests, through ‘form, colour, or texture, or pattern […] they become spaces for me to exist’.ii Combining inside and outside in a single image, windows are powerfully symbolic objects for Fadojutimi, providing a real-world analogue for the spatial qualities of her paintings – flat, ultimately, but capable of combining multiple images on a single plane and capturing a whole world beyond their surface. Like the experience of catching the trace of your own reflection superimposed on the scene beyond the windowpane, the artist conceptualises her paintings as ‘reflections of myself and the objects I surround myself with’, as well as spaces that she can escape into.iii
Undoubtedly one of the most exciting young British artists working today, Fadojutimi’s work can be found in numerous prestigious collections, including The Hepworth Wakefield, Tate, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Miami. Executed at a pivotal moment in the artist’s developing practice in the year following her graduation from the Royal College of Art and the same year as I Present Your Royal Highness, now held in Tate’s permanent Collection, Beneath the Petticoat simultaneously illuminates the roots of Fadojutimi’s visual language and points to the ever more ambitious directions that she would go on to take her work in.
Interview with Jadé Fadojutimi ahead of her first exhibition in a public institution, The Numbing Vibrancy of Characters in Play held at Peer Gallery in 2019.
Collector’s Digest
A graduate of the prestigious Slade School and the Royal College of Art in London, British artist Jadé Fadojutimi is now internationally represented by Gagosian Gallery. Most recently, Fadojutimi has been a resident at the LUMA Foundation in Arles.
The youngest artist to be represented in the Tate Collection, with works held in other major institutional collections including the Baltimore Museum of Art and The Hepworth Wakefield, Fadojutimi has mounted significant solo exhibitions at The Institute of Contemporary Arts in Miami, The Hepworth Wakefield, and the Musée nationale d’art moderne in Paris.
The first auction house to offer works by Faojutimi for sale, Phillips also secured the auction record for the artist when we offered her 2017 work Myths of Pleasure in October 2021.
i Jennifer Higgie, ‘From Life – Thoughts on the paintings of Jadé Fadojutimi’, in Jadé Fadojutimi: Jesture, London, 2021, n.p.
ii Jadé Fadojutimi, quoted in ‘Tate Short’, 2020, online.
iii Jadé Fadojutimi, quoted in ‘Tate Short’, 2020, online.
Provenance
Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner
Jadé Fadojutimi is a British contemporary artist who lives and works in London. A recent graduate of the Royal College of Art, Fadojutimi has seen a precipitous ascent to success: she is the youngest artist represented in the collection of the Tate, London, and has upcoming exhibitions planned for the Hepworth Wakefield and the Liverpool Biennial. Fadojutimi’s work is immersive and all-encompassing, featuring tightly woven lattices of ecstatic pigment and electric line. The raw but bubbly energy of her paintings reflects aspects of the artist’s own interiority, as she treats each canvas as an opportunity to explore undiscovered or under-interrogated aspects of her individuality. Fadojutimi believes that color and personality mingle and encourage one another; the matrices of line and color resemble the psychedelic spindles of neural networks, actualizing the artist’s investigative efforts as visual translations of the artist’s explorations of identity and fluidity.
Fadojutimi brings a frenetic energy to painting, as many of her works are completed in late-night bursts of creativity; what may start the night as a blank canvas often emerges in the morning as a finished work. Describing her practice in environmental terms, Fadojutimi strives to incorporate the ineffable associations of memory absorbed from the warm moments and special objects of life; taken against the societal backdrop of their creation, Fadojutimi’s paintings shine out as optimistic beacons for dark times.
signed, titled and dated ‘‘Beneath the Petticoat’ July ’18 Jadé Fadojutimi’ on the reverse oil on canvas 101.4 x 76.3 cm (39 7/8 x 30 in.) Painted in July 2018.