A corrugated metal door rattles open and Jadé Fadojutimi appears. She welcomes me inside, as the sun beats down on the south London industrial estate where she keeps a studio. An extremely stylish dresser, who often poses on Instagram in an outfit coordinated with her paintings, the artist is today wearing a neon yellow top and multicoloured shorts, with her nails painted green, red and teal – all part of her oeuvre, she explains, since “anything that creates a composition is a painting”. Spirit, an ambient album by Atom Music Audio, booms from the speakers. Two rococo settees sit either side of a table bearing a bottle of sake, surrounded by an extravagant display of pot plants. And propped against the walls are her enormous, immersive, gloriously colourful new paintings, destined for Hepworth Wakefield in Yorkshire this month.
The show, she explains, is called Can We See the Colour Green Because We Have a Name For It? The title was inspired by a book by Peter Wohlleben called The Heartbeat of Trees, “about our senses and relationships to colour and how where you grow up kind of determines the colours you can see and your colour sensitivity”. Fadojutimi believes she has synaesthesia (although “there’s no test for it”), where other forms of stimulation bring on visions of colour. “I’m not one of those people who reads and then the words change colour, but when I feel emotion, I see a colour and that’s how my paintings come to life.”
