As a teenager, British artist Jadé Fadojutimi developed an obsession with Japanese popular culture. Today, she often paints to soundtracks from Japanese videogames or anime. The moments of nostalgia Fadojutimi experiences while painting – which are also sparked by memories from her childhood, or even the clothes in her wardrobe – seep into the canvases through explosive gestures and a vivid use of colour. Beginning each painting with an attitude akin to shoshin, the Japanese concept of a “beginner’s mind,” Fadojutimi allows the familiar objects that populate reality (a perceptive viewer might recognise objects like stockings and hats, patterned materials, or the faint suggestion of landscape lines) to elude recognition and assert their transcendent, metaphysical qualities. Having recently moved to a studio with six-metre ceilings, Fadojutimi is able to paint on a scale that she could previously have only imagined. For The Milk of Dreams, she has produced three new paintings (The Prolific Beauty of Our Panicked Landscape; And that day, she remembered how to purr; and Rebirth; all 2022) in ambitious, monumental sizes. These new works enhance the immersive quality that is central to her greater practice; rather than objects to view from a distance, the paintings become places or moments for the viewer to exist within and alongside.
Liv Cuniberti & Ian Wallace
