After sitting for a while in contemplation, Fadojutimi gathered herself to paint. “Marty, would you pick me a color?” she asked. He leaped up and threw a nitrile glove at a shelf of paints to make a random choice. It hit a shade of blue, and he started preparing a dish of the color. One of Fadojutimi’s favorite materials is Interference paint, from a New York-based brand called Williamsburg; the pigment changes color depending on the direction of the light, giving her paintings a silvery or pearly sheen. Fadojutimi adjusted the playlist on her iPhone so that a tremulous orchestral track called “Flow Like Water,” composed by James Newton Howard for the fantasy film “The Last Airbender,” flooded from the speakers, and she approached the blank canvas. She used purple and pink acrylic markers to make the first gestures—straight grasslike lines and rounded shapes like chrysanthemum blooms—before adding what looked momentarily like a kindergartner’s drawing of a stuffed animal: a circle for a body, another for a head, two more for ears.
Wearing gloves, Fadojutimi seized a dish of neon-pink paint in her left hand and a sponge in her right. She swept the color boldly across the canvas, then called for a bucket of water, into which she dipped two sponges, squeezing their contents over the paint she’d just applied, to create washes of color. With a round brush, she added punches of deep purple to the pink, then took up a flat brush, scraping all the pigment into a hard, tight arc before squeezing water on it again. She then seized a fine brush, applying busy patches of teal; climbing on a step stool, she added lines that clambered up the canvas.
After about half an hour, she used a thick brush to put on the final element, at least for now: a horizontal bank of the blue paint at the top of the composition, like a twilit sky. She pulled off her gloves, stepped back, and sat on a couch to regard her handiwork. The painting wasn’t finished, and it remained possible that she might ultimately deem it a failure. (About a fifth of the paintings Fadojutimi makes are never allowed out of the studio.) When I asked her how she felt, she laughed, and seemed initially at a loss for words—after all, how she felt was right there, on the canvas in front of us. “I feel like I want a cigarette,” she offered. “I feel refreshed. I feel like I just had a shower.”
Fadojutimi grew up in Ilford, a town on the eastern fringe of Greater London, the eldest of three daughters. Her father, a management consultant, and her mother, a civil servant, are British of Nigerian heritage, and in some respects her upbringing hewed to familiar cultural contours. She was permitted less social liberty than some of her schoolmates, and was expected to perform well academically—although, she told me wryly, “I don’t have the toughest Nigerian parents in the world. We know this because I am doing art.”
Fadojutimi was a solitary child and adolescent, aware from an early age that she didn’t experience the world as many of her peers did. She preferred the classical soundtracks of Hans Zimmer to Beyoncé, and did not read the “Harry Potter” books. She recognizes that she spent much of her youth in a state of depression, although at the time she “couldn’t actually understand how you could live any other way.” She had a philosophical outlook on her condition. “I didn’t understand why everyone cared so much about what other people thought,” she said. “I am a person who removes herself rather than tries to blend in, so I also created my own loneliness at a very young age. But I also had the best time. It filled my world with music—it filled my world with color. My bedroom was my studio. I used to build worlds in there.”
While she was still in elementary school, she discovered Japanese anime through watching “Sailor Moon,” a television adaptation of a manga series about a girl whose encounter with a talking cat inducts her into a new identity as a powerful heroine who fights evil. By the time Fadojutimi entered high school, she was a devotee of the genre. “I watched at least three hundred different series—I would sleep, wake up, and watch more anime,” she said. “I was really moved by them. I remember thinking, Wow, for how depressed I am, I am really living through these animations.” Fascinated by what she knew of Japanese youth culture, she began attending twice-yearly anime conventions in London, dressing in the style known as Lolita. The aesthetic is exaggerated twee girlishness: frilly pastel-colored dresses, ankle socks edged with lace, wigs decked out with oversized satin bows. “I felt more like myself when I was dressed up in these outfits than I did when I was in anything ordinary,” Fadojutimi told me. “You don’t even recognize yourself anymore. I was very into everything that was imagined into the real—dolls, cuddly toys, even going to Disneyland. So being able to play a part in that made me feel like I was existing beyond existence.”
After graduating from high school, where she had specialized in math, physics, and art, she enrolled at the Slade School of Fine Art, in London. Many of her classmates were far more sophisticated than she was about the art world—they knew which galleries represented which top artists, and had a much firmer grounding in art history. They talked about the concepts and ideas underpinning their work in a way that Fadojutimi felt unable to do. She told me, “I just liked color. Everyone seemed to think that my reason for making paintings wasn’t a reason at all. I was thinking about feelings, about soundtracks. Why does this anime that I watched three years ago still linger in my mind? Why can’t I let go of things like that, and why is it so hard to move on? I was having all these questions about emotions that weren’t therapeutic questions—they were very abstract.” She went on, “I wanted to feel these things through color, but I didn’t know how to express them. That’s where my paintings started coming from, but everyone was, like, ‘You can’t just make paintings from feelings.’ ”
Fadojutimi especially bridled against any suggestion that her work was, or should be, about her racial identity, particularly when the critical framework was derived predominantly from the experience of Black Americans. Her heritage, like that of many Black Britons, is one of immigration from Africa, which has its own distinct and complex history. “It felt like a lot of the people who wanted to talk about what it meant to them to be Black would always lean upon histories of racism and slavery, and that never made sense to me here in England,” she told me. She hasn’t been to Nigeria, and, although her work has been bought by collectors who focus on Black or African-diasporic artists, Fadojutimi does not consider the lens of race to be generative for her art. “It was never one of my questions in the first place,” she said.
Imaginatively and creatively, Fadojutimi continued to be fascinated by Japanese culture—or at least what she understood of it from manga and anime. Having completed her degree at the Slade, she went on to do an M.A. at the Royal College of Art, where she had the opportunity to take part in a four-month exchange program in Kyoto. She immediately discovered that the everyday reality of Japanese life didn’t map onto her heightened expectations of what it would be like. That awakening was accompanied by a retreat into solitude and rumination. “To get my head around the realization that everything I had dreamed of wasn’t true was heartbreaking,” she said, noting, “A lot of my stories have started with a beautiful depression where I have been forced to succumb to the fact that reality will always be different to your idea of what you want the world to be.” Nonetheless, she worked on improving her command of Japanese—she has become proficient, though less fluent than she would like to be—and produced huge quantities of drawings in which she began to find a language of her own. Japan remains an important part of her life; she spends a couple of months in the country every winter, and has found that it is an amenable place for her not only to paint but also to take a break from painting. Unlike in London, she is able to find a restaurant that’s open at 3 a.m., when she’s often just finished a canvas, and she can go out to eat alone without feeling unsafe.
Peter Davies, a lecturer at the Slade, told me that he was stunned by her development when he attended her R.C.A. graduation show, after her return from Japan. “Jadé’s work was extraordinary—something had happened, and it had completely changed,” he said. She had a new mastery of materials that combined the swiftness of drawing with the substantiality of painting. After graduating, in 2017, Fadojutimi was signed by Pippy Houldsworth, the London gallerist, who swiftly placed her work with collectors and in museums, in addition to connecting her with other gallerists internationally. Gisela Capitain, whose gallery in Cologne is one of several that now represent Fadojutimi, presented a solo exhibition of her work in 2019. “Her paintings are wild, poetic, from time to time melancholic,” Capitain told me. As young as Fadojutimi was, she was also extremely self-possessed and ambitious: “She had her notebook, and had certain questions about how we would work with her as a gallery. ‘What is the commission?’ ‘How do you present the work?’ She is on the one side extremely clear, and like a businesswoman. And on the other she is like the most genuine artist you can ever imagine.”
Two years ago, Fadojutimi jumped from Houldsworth to Gagosian. “I outgrew Pippy,” she told me. “It was too personal. I didn’t want a mum anymore.” Making the move from a small, independent gallery to a global powerhouse provides an artist with substantial new resources; it can also exert unwelcome pressures, especially on a young person. Capitain said to me, “We told her, ‘Be aware—it’s a completely different setup, and it’s a completely different economic situation. It could be a risk. It could be that you have to make some compromises you aren’t used to.’ But she was sure that she could handle it.”
Not long after she joined the gallery, Gagosian devoted its booth at the art fair Frieze London to Fadojutimi, showing a series of seven works that some critics deemed underwhelming. In the Guardian, Jonathan Jones wrote that “her paintings boom and crash with color yet they don’t stop zinging long enough to let you sink into them.” In The Art Newspaper, in an article headlined “Be Ultra-Wary of the Ultra-Contemporary: A Triumph of Hot Air Over Real Value,” the critic Ben Luke described Fadojutimi’s offerings as “undercooked” and “apparently rushed out of the studio.” He also noted that all of them had reportedly sold for half a million pounds apiece.
Fadojutimi is not the only current artist who makes works at high speed—Luc Tuymans, the Belgian painter, is known for completing canvases in a day, and the British figurative painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye often matches this pace. Fadojutimi, who has always worked quickly, is sensitive to the notion that her paintings are rushed. She also rejects the implication that she, or Gagosian, is cashing in while the going is good. “People were seeing me as commercial, because I work fast, but that’s the way I am,” she told me. “I felt like I wasn’t being seen as a great painter but as someone who just paints for money, which is impossible. I just know that when my paintings evolve I expect that to be reflected in their price, to some extent. Because otherwise I’d rather just keep them to myself.” Fadojutimi said that, although it is nice that her work sells, she gets more gratification from having her paintings enter the collections of museums.
