ART CITIES: Hong Kong-Tunji Adeniyi Jones
Tunji Adeniyi-Jones is a painter whose work is heavily steeped in West African aesthetics; his imagery is a dedication and an homage, a preservation of his Yoruban heritage that also questions idolatry from a distinctly diasporic perspective. He is further invested in presenting this history and personal reflection through an idiosyncratic and contemporized context as his stylized figures and flora adornments float in suspension through preternatural or ritualistic environments, replete with repeating patterns rendered in vibrant tones.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: White Cube Archive
Tunji Adeniyi-Jones for “Deep Dive” his first solo exhibition in Hong Kong has created a new suite of paintings and delicate lithographs that address historical subjects, such as mythology, religion and the spectacle of ceremony – through the lens of the contemporary diaspora. As a British Nigerian living and working in New York, Adeniyi-Jones’s influences are wide ranging, and comprise African, American and European references. Grounded though the works are in the myth and culture of his own Yoruba heritage, he also looks to the Black-American culture of his immediate surroundings, embracing both the similarities and differences between this lineage and his own. Executed in oil on canvas or in acrylic on board, the paintings feature near life-size figures in vibrant colors set against a background of foliage, making reference to the intricate patterns of the 19th-century Arts and Crafts movement, specifically the tile designs of William de Morgan. With its roots in Modernism, the movement aimed to combine human ingenuity with natural form to advance a utopian vision. At the same time, the artist’s use of foliage as motif is an allusion to West African literature, wherein the jungle often appears as a symbol of exploration, transition and potential. Rotating the canvas while working allows the artist to create a space with indeterminate horizon line and orientation; it is within this space that the solid ground becomes destabilised, its gravitational pull undermined. Enabling Adeniyi-Jones to choreograph the dance between bodies and natural forms also is a conception of the body as both a specific and open-ended entity. This idea is realised through his use of the silhouette, a reference to American artist Aaron Douglas who used silhouettes in his work as an expression of multiplicity as well as the effortless fluidity of paintings by Nigerian Modernist Ben Enwonwu. Confined within a shallow picture plane, the gender-fluid bodies are muscular to the point of appearing stylised, each toned limb, torso and head emphatically delineated. Working against the flattened pictorial space championed by abstraction, figures dip and dive, emerging and retreating from their backgrounds, the sinuous outlines of leaves subtly echoing the curves of the body in endless rhythmic iteration. The paintings result from a drawing-centred process (in which lines can be overdrawn as much as five times in a single work), as such, the figures are outlined with thin black paint. The eyes, the last element to be added, punctuate each composition, their directional gaze lending agency and autonomy to each of the figures as well as serving to draw the viewer’s gaze into and around the complex pictorial space. Echoing the dynamism of the larger canvases, a new body of lithographs extend the themes of the paintings at a personal scale. Printmaking forms a generative part of the artist’s practice; one that is collaborative and, as he sees it, less predictable, and which connects him to a lineage of Nigerian artists including Bruce Onobrakpeya, Demas Nwoko and Yusuf Grillo. The series of six new ‘Midnight Voices’ lithographs directly inform the new paintings, featuring silhouetted bodies lying in repose against complex patterns of foliage and flora. Possessing the quality of a looser touch of hand, they offer an ‘intimate insight into the thought process behind my larger works’.
* Yoruba, one of the three largest ethnic groups of Nigeria, concentrated in the southwestern part of that country. Much smaller, scattered groups live in Benin and northern Togo. The Yoruba numbered more than 20 million at the turn of the 21st century. They speak a language of the Benue-Congo branch of the Niger-Congo language family.
Photo: Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Twin Virtues in Pink, 2021, Oil on canvas, 56 × 58 in. (142.2 × 147.3 cm), © Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Courtesy the artist and White Cube Gallery
Info: White Cube Gallery, 50 Connaught Road Central, Hong Kong, Duration: 22/3-20/5/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-19:00, https://whitecube.com/
