Acquainted Intruder

Alive with colour, texture, light and movement, Acquainted Intruder (2018) is a vast and exuberant early work by British artist Jadé Fadojutimi. Burnished tones of red and orange sweep across the picture plane like fireworks against the night sky, punctuated by floating cells of blue, pink and purple that drift in hypnotic constellations. Oil and iridescent pigments shimmer across the canvas, creating a rich, hallucinogenic space. Drawing together influences ranging from contemporary Japanese subculture to painters such as Amy Sillman and Phoebe Unwin, Fadojutimi paints freely and intuitively, viewing the process as a means of digging deeper into her own identity and emotions. The approach has propelled her to rapid critical acclaim over the past few years: as well as becoming the youngest artist in the Tate collection in 2021, and featuring in the Hayward Gallery’s celebrated group exhibition Mixing It Up: Painting Today, she is currently the subject of her first major institutional solo show at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. She will exhibit at the Hepworth Wakefield this autumn.  

Born and raised in London, Fadojutimi studied at both the Slade School of Fine Art and the Royal College of Art, completing her MA the year before the present work. Growing up, her wide-ranging interests—including fashion, anime, soundtracks, video games and Korean dramas—were united by a powerful love of colour: an obsession that ultimately inspired her to paint. Fadojutimi views art-making as a deeply personal act, requiring a state of heightened sensory awareness. Often working late at night—a time when her mind feels most alert—she surrounds herself with visual stimuli, including plants, soft toys from her childhood, clothes and pieces of furniture, as well as her own writings, drawings and half-completed paintings. She pays close attention to the feelings, memories and impulses that arise from these objects, sparking organic forms and gestures that evolve like characters. For Fadojutimi, the process is one of rich sensory indulgence: ‘I completely bathe in the conversations between colour, texture, line, form, composition, rhythm, marks and disturbances’, she explains (J. Fadojutimi, quoted in D. Trigg, ‘Jadé Fadojutimi—interview’, Studio International, 26 April 2021).

Despite the cryptic nature of Fadojutimi’s titles, the present work’s designation—Acquainted Intruder—seems to evoke something of the artist’s process. It captures the sense of familiar incursion that fires her imagination: a sudden memory, the onset of a buried emotion, the feeling of having discovered something new about herself. This dynamic is reflected in the painting’s surface, where tangled lines interrupt beams of colour and oblique shapes mutate into forms that half resemble reality. Translucent washes of colour morph into impasto; mottled flesh tones are intercepted by flashes of electric red and blue. It is a vivid picture of the shifting, abstract manner in which our sense of self changes and evolves: like sound produced by an instrument, it lives and breathes with the movement of its maker, rising and falling in and out of darkness.