TUNJI ADENIYI-JONES: IMMERSIONS
White Cube is pleased to present Tunji Adeniyi-Jones’s solo exhibition ‘Immersions’.
January 10 - February 22, 2025
Citing painting’s ‘innate ability to capture form and physicality’, Adeniyi-Jones has established an artistic sensibility that places figuration in dialogue with the language of abstraction. His influences are wide-ranging, merging cultural signifiers to create spaces that are both fantastical and rooted in diasporic narratives and histories of exchange. For the artist, the human body serves as a vessel for storytelling, becoming a site for modes of self-governance, conveyed particularly through the elastic gestures of dance. His paintings are populated with highly stylised, genderless figures that seem to writhe, dip and dive across the canvas. They are rendered in free-flowing lines that are informed by Nigerian Yoruba practices of body painting and scarification, but with a ‘loosening of specificity’ so that they are free to move ‘across and between histories and spaces’. Abstraction, in turn, becomes a tool for representing ‘a different kind of Blackness’, a liminal space wherein the figure may exist as symbol, deity, mythical creature.
Adeniyi-Jones’s figures emerge from environments that simultaneously recall verdant undergrowth and the ornamentation of the Arts and Crafts movement. The sinuous, leaf-like forms that comprise these dense backgrounds complement the curves of the fragmented bodies, conjuring a sense of rhythm and motion. Adeniyi-Jones’s interest in dance also speaks to this notion, drawing parallels between the fluidity of movement and the plurality of selfhood – especially as a resistance to the projected desires imposed on Black bodies.
Supported by the artist’s research into African dance practices during the transatlantic slave trade, Adeniyi-Jones examines how these traditions have been preserved and reimagined, and what role they continue to have in one’s sense of liberation and autonomy against the fixity of the ‘Othering’ gaze. Here, Adeniyi-Jones also makes reference to the work of African American artist Aaron Douglas (1899–1979), a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance who adopted the silhouette as an expression of multiplicity.
In Adeniyi-Jones’s canvases, the almond-shaped eyes are the last element to be added, and their direct gaze punctuates his compositions. The bodies he paints are not passive: they take up, hold and move through space. They are looked at, but they also look out directly at the viewer. For the artist, this interchange speaks to W.E.B Du Bois’s conception of ‘double consciousness’ – of existing simultaneously in one’s sense of Black identity and the ‘Othering’ gaze of others. It is within this charged space – between autonomy and expectation – that Adeniyi-Jones’s abstracted figures celebrated the multifaceted nature of selfhood.