Tejumola Adenuga’s solo exhibition, ‘FUTURE, PAST', is filled with paintings and furniture designs in black and white ink which he uses intricately, making everything pop. The artist’s choice of painting in black and white, free of colour is as a result of his colour blindness which makes colours not as vivid and everything linked towards grayscale. ‘Colour blindness is a desaturation of the natural environment. So I never had a full understanding of what colour looked like. So having my work in a monochromatic format was a way in which it was best I could communicate at the point, and over time, in order to have a bit of complexity, I started leaning towards stippling in my work. That was the foundation aesthetic basic,’ Adenuga shares.
The exhibition, which runs through July 14, 2024, features a series of paintings of people from a small village in Nigeria. The story, tied towards the street Adenuga grew up in, pays homage to the artisans and royals that lived there in the fictional universe — the village — which he created.
