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Lot Essay
Jadé Fadojutimi’s Untitled (2024) has been generously donated by the artist as part of BUILD IT, BEAT IT, a selection of artworks sold to raise funds towards the building of the Children’s Cancer Centre at Great Ormond Street Hospital. Two and a half metres tall and just under two metres wide, this radiant, enveloping canvas pulsates with chromatic fervour. Paint blooms across the surface of the canvas, as fluent swathes of periwinkle blue and teal mingle with warm washes of cadmium orange and magenta. The effect suggests a gently receding river valley, below piles of fluffy cumulus clouds caught in the glow of a setting sun. Oil-bar strokes evocative of butterflies’ wings or rugged natural formations provide a striking graphic foil to the profusion of broad, brushy strokes. Born in London in 1993, Fadojutimi has received extraordinary critical acclaim in recent years for paintings which hover between figuration and abstraction. A self-professed synesthete, the artist is particularly attuned to colour and sound; each painting captures the fleeting impression of an indescribable emotional environment, specific to the moment of its making.
Fadojutimi works quickly, with an urgency felt keenly in the present work’s vital, expressive brushstrokes, and without any prior conception of the final composition. Working intuitively, she draws from a plethora of visual sources, from Japanese anime—an obsession discovered in childhood upon watching Sailor Moon, a television adaptation of a popular manga series—to fashion, video games and plush soft toys. In her studio, an office hung with racks of brightly coloured and patterned clothes serves as visual inspiration for her paintings. She paints accompanied by a medley of fast dance and sweeping classical music, and soundtracks from her favourite films, interspersed with the patter of rain as it hits the corrugated-metal roof of her vast South East London studio. This soundscape infiltrates her work, each canvas punctuated by a sense of steady rhythm, as well as moments of crescendo and repose. ‘When I was really young I wanted to be a fashion designer’, Fadojutimi explains. ‘And my dream is to be a composer. So now I call myself a composer of colour’ (J. Fadojutimi quoted in N. Trembley, ‘Who is Jadé Fadojutimi, young painter already represented by mega-gallery Gagosian?’, Numero, 31 March 2023).
While studying at London’s Slade School of Art and the Royal College of Art, Fadojutimi looked to the paintings of Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne, Joan Mitchell and Lee Krasner, adding a profound admiration for art history’s masters of colour to her own deeply personal visual education. Her paintings display an adept command of materials, often layering paint, oil stick and pastel in a single canvas. She is particularly fond of Interference oil paint, made by New York-based brand Williamsburg, which changes colour according to the slant of surrounding light, forming a pearlescent sheen across the surface of the canvas. In the present work, each rococo flourish of the artist’s brush is laden with paint applied wet on wet, forging a gently shimmering, animate patina suggestive of a softly glowing stained-glass window. It is with such evocative, alluring canvases that Fadojutimi conjures fantastic, phantasmagorical other worlds, and invites the viewer to join her within them.
Fadojutimi works quickly, with an urgency felt keenly in the present work’s vital, expressive brushstrokes, and without any prior conception of the final composition. Working intuitively, she draws from a plethora of visual sources, from Japanese anime—an obsession discovered in childhood upon watching Sailor Moon, a television adaptation of a popular manga series—to fashion, video games and plush soft toys. In her studio, an office hung with racks of brightly coloured and patterned clothes serves as visual inspiration for her paintings. She paints accompanied by a medley of fast dance and sweeping classical music, and soundtracks from her favourite films, interspersed with the patter of rain as it hits the corrugated-metal roof of her vast South East London studio. This soundscape infiltrates her work, each canvas punctuated by a sense of steady rhythm, as well as moments of crescendo and repose. ‘When I was really young I wanted to be a fashion designer’, Fadojutimi explains. ‘And my dream is to be a composer. So now I call myself a composer of colour’ (J. Fadojutimi quoted in N. Trembley, ‘Who is Jadé Fadojutimi, young painter already represented by mega-gallery Gagosian?’, Numero, 31 March 2023).
While studying at London’s Slade School of Art and the Royal College of Art, Fadojutimi looked to the paintings of Claude Monet and Paul Cézanne, Joan Mitchell and Lee Krasner, adding a profound admiration for art history’s masters of colour to her own deeply personal visual education. Her paintings display an adept command of materials, often layering paint, oil stick and pastel in a single canvas. She is particularly fond of Interference oil paint, made by New York-based brand Williamsburg, which changes colour according to the slant of surrounding light, forming a pearlescent sheen across the surface of the canvas. In the present work, each rococo flourish of the artist’s brush is laden with paint applied wet on wet, forging a gently shimmering, animate patina suggestive of a softly glowing stained-glass window. It is with such evocative, alluring canvases that Fadojutimi conjures fantastic, phantasmagorical other worlds, and invites the viewer to join her within them.