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By Fidelis Akpom
There was something fitting about the darkness of one of the halls inside the J. Randle Centre in Onikan, Lagos. The walls had been draped entirely in black fabric, and against that backdrop, the paintings of the late Olu Ajayi glowed with unusual intensity. Reds burned brighter. Blues deepened. Flesh tones seemed almost to breathe. The memorial exhibition held in his honour on May 23, 2026 (exactly one year of Ajayi’s passing), felt less like a solemn retrospective than a gathering of memory, argument, colour, and affection – all the things Ajayi himself embodied.
The exhibition, assembled majorly from the private collections of Professor Adesoji Adesugba, Nero Asilebua, and Wole Soyinka by curator and scholar, Professor Amwa Amkpa of the New York University, revealed the full breadth of that sensibility across thirty-four works. There were loose mixed-media figure studies in which the human body dissolved into washes of violet and rose, ink lines rapid and unsparing, watercolour bleeding beyond them into luminous atmospheres. There were thick impasto abstractions built with palette knives into geological surfaces so physically present one half-expected them to be warm to the touch, cold slashes of teal cutting through fields of burnt orange and crimson with the decisiveness of a horizon. Elsewhere, figures emerged through dense cascading vertical strokes of paint that made them shimmer as though caught between visibility and disappearance. Throughout the exhibition, what surfaced repeatedly was Ajayi’s extraordinary relationship with colour itself. He used it not decoratively but emotionally – sometimes sensuous, sometimes confrontational.
Ajayi’s “drizzle” technique appeared in several figurative works composed through dense vertical strokes that created shimmering, almost pixelated surfaces. The figures seemed to hover between emergence and dissolution, as though memory itself were struggling to hold them in place. His portrait of Professors Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe carried not merely resemblance but psychological gravity. Faces, in Ajayi’s hands, were never simply painted; they were interrogated.
One of the exhibition’s quiet triumphs was a spare drawing of a nude torso executed with little more than bold, calligraphic ink lines against white space. Ajayi stripped the human figure down to its essential gestures: the curve of a spine, the sweep of a thigh, the quiet weight of a torso. The economy was startling. With barely a dozen strokes, he achieved what lesser artists often bury beneath excess detail and overworking. Nothing was wasted; every mark felt inevitable.
“Faces, in Ajayi’s hands, were never simply painted; they were interrogated.”
Perhaps the exhibition’s most emotionally resonant work bore a 1997 signature: a solitary figure seated or hunched forward, head bowed, the posture conveying grief, exhaustion, or profound contemplation without the need for visible facial expression. The facelessness was not a limitation but the work’s emotional core. The figure became universal – anyone burdened by memory, solitude, or loss. Technically restrained yet emotionally expansive, the painting lingered in the mind long after others faded.
Equally compelling was a painting of a seated male nude, elbow resting on knee, cheek supported by his hand in a pose of introspection. The figure looked away, denying the viewer easy access. As with many works in the exhibition, interiority – not identity – was the true subject. Ajayi’s decision to render the body in cool greens and teals against a warm field of peach, yellow, and pink created extraordinary chromatic tension. The figure seemed illuminated by an entirely different emotional climate than the space surrounding him. Brushstrokes remained visible and deliberate; anatomy was suggested rather than clinically rendered, lending the figure both elegance and emotional distance.
One of the viewing’s most affecting gestures was also its simplest: a small table near one of the exits displaying Ajayi’s brushes, paint tubes, palette knives, and pigments beside a bouquet of flowers. Above it hung a large photograph of the artist painting in his studio. The arrangement felt less like curatorial staging than a quiet acknowledgment that, for Ajayi, painting had been inseparable from living itself.
If the exhibition possessed a weakness, it was the absence of titles and contextual labels for many of the works. Ajayi was deeply invested in symbolism, narrative tension, and philosophical inquiry, and one occasionally sensed viewers being denied fuller access to the intellectual architecture beneath the paintings.
Still, the show’s opening event succeeded where it mattered most. As the drifting music of the Afowo Slide Band moved effortlessly from Nigerian highlife into jazz and, improbably, “Guantanamera,” guests danced, lingered before canvases, and slipped into animated conversations. Friends, artists, collectors, and former collaborators moved warmly through the room, transforming the exhibition into something larger than commemoration alone. It became a reminder that Olu Ajayi’s legacy lies not only in the images he created, but in the restless, intellectually alive spirit behind them.
In an era increasingly impatient with nuance, Ajayi remained committed to complexity: political without propaganda, expressive without sentimentality, and deeply human without surrendering to cliché. His paintings continue to speak in colour. But also, unmistakably, in conscience.
Colour as Resistance: The Art and Advocacy of Olu Ajayi ran from May 23 to June 2, 2026, at the J. Randle Centre, Onikan, Lagos.
