The Gun, the Circle, and the Black Canvas
By Olumide Ajayi
There is a gun in Aphonia. Olumide Ajayi kept it there deliberately, and when asked why, the answer came back without hesitation. "A gun is something that I use as a representation of power," he told me. He cited a Yoruba adage: a child without power should not ask what caused its father's death. The point, he said, is that powerlessness silences you. You might know the right answer in a room, in an argument, in a country, and still say nothing, because you lack the standing to make the words land. The gun stays in the painting because silence is the subject. But the painting is also, he said, about what happens when that silence breaks—when a platform appears, when a voice becomes possible. He described reaching a point where he felt he could speak against what he saw in society, that he could be the change rather than the person who stays quiet. The gun, in that reading, is not only a symbol of what others hold over you. It is a record of what you did not yet have.
Ajayi is thirty, based in Ibadan, and has been working professionally for three years. His medium is ink and acrylic on canvas. His exhibition record is short but building: Aimasiko and Unity Renewed, both shown at the National Museum of Unity in Ibadan in early 2025, and two more in 2026—The Coalition at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture in Ibadan, and Galari in Ikeja, Lagos. The work he is making now is already more crowded than the work he started with, and that shift is not accidental.
When we spoke, he described a studio practice built around simultaneity. He does not finish one painting before moving to the next. He works on three or four canvases at the same time, moving between them while sections dry, keeping the same emotional current running across all of them. "Life doesn't wait for you to be alright," he wrote in his statement, and the line is not rhetorical. It describes how he actually paints. The cycle keeps moving; you keep moving with it.
The works that have emerged from this practice deal with what he calls the not-so-obvious feelings: grief, silence, the specific loneliness of being surrounded by people who do not see you. His titles are clinical in the way that precise language sometimes is. Aphonia is the medical term for loss of voice. Aposiopesis refers to a sentence that breaks off before it finishes. Catharsis, his most recent completed piece, skipped the sketch stage entirely. He started from the edge of the main figure and followed the brush. "I wasn't overthinking the idea or the creation process," he said. "I was just following it as it is in my heart." When he stepped back—six to ten feet from the canvas—and the piece said what he needed it to say, he stopped.
That process of stepping back is literal and deliberate. He described standing at a distance from the canvas, checking whether the painting has come together from every angle, deciding whether another colour or another layer is needed. The last colour he reaches for is usually a bright one, something to pull the idea forward and give it what he called a soft feeling. Yellow held that role for a long time. More recently, he has been reaching for red. The shift is not about danger or urgency in the conventional sense. For Ajayi, red means something more specific: you do not have to move at the speed everyone else is moving. You can hold your own pace and still arrive. He said it guides his research, the stories he decides to tell, the audience he is trying to reach. When collectors respond to his work and describe how a piece changed something for them, that feedback filters back into the next canvas. He incorporates what they give him.
The formal vocabulary he uses is spare and recurring. A circle appears in nearly every painting, usually at the centre. He described it as his starting point, the shape that establishes direction before anything else is decided. More recently, he has introduced a square. The square, he explained, is about the four sides of any situation—the story as it looks from above, from below, from the left, from the right. Where the circle drives the composition forward, the square holds it in balance. When the balance slips, he said, he goes back to the circle. The brush, in those moments, takes a break. He looks at how far the painting has come before deciding what it still needs.
Numbers are embedded in the work too, though they are not always visible on first looking. Each painting contains a number that corresponds either to the year in which the experience it depicts occurred, or to the number of hours Ajayi spent sitting with the idea before he picked up a brush. He wants viewers to find these numbers and then ask themselves what happened to them in that year, whether they recognise something in it. The hours, he said, are there to make a different point: ideas do not form quickly. You have to sit with them, let them settle, before the painting can begin. He described spending days in front of a black canvas, doing nothing but thinking. The canvas is black, he said, and the black canvas is already an idea.
His recent Late Night Thoughts series—two small-format pieces that also skipped the sketch stage—marks a turn toward more compressed work, the same formal concerns held in a tighter field. Both pieces, along with Catharsis, were made without preliminary drawings, the composition arriving whole enough that he went straight to the ink. He is also beginning to include multiple figures in compositions that previously held only one. The solitary figure was the signature of his earlier work, the person alone in the frame. Now there are more faces, more positions within a single life, more shapes beyond the central circle. Whether that shift reflects a change in what he wants to say or a change in what he is technically able to say is probably both.
The piece he was working on when we spoke takes the inward-facing subject further. It concerns what he called being unseen—the condition of standing in a crowd and remaining invisible, not because no one is present but because the door between you and them is closed. The first mark on that canvas was a circle. He had added black lines along the edges to suggest what he described as the dark side of society. The figure in the composition is in a forlorn state, and the challenge he was working through was how to bring it forward just enough, using colour, without dissolving the tension that makes the image work. When it is not working, he said, he goes back to his drawing board, finds the colour that will carry the idea, and tries again.
He is aware that the same image means different things to different people, and he does not try to close that gap. Collectors tell him what a work meant to them, and the meaning is often not what he put in. He does not correct them. "The same thing can mean different things to different people depending on your story," he said, "and no one, however similar our stories are, no one actually shared the same story." The numbers, the circles, the gun in Aphonia—he puts them there with specific intent, but he holds that intent loosely once the painting leaves the studio.
Ajayi grew up in Osun State, in a region he has described as having deep roots in artistic tradition, and his path to painting ran through science, business management, and technology before it arrived at the studio. That background is not incidental. The precision with which he tracks his own process—the hours logged before a brushstroke, the numbered experiences embedded in the paint, the systematic movement between canvases—reflects a mind that thinks in systems as much as in images. His statement describes the body as a window into the mind, and the paintings as a canvas for feelings that would otherwise have no form. The clinical titles are part of the same logic: name the condition exactly, then show it without explanation.
Before stepping away from a finished piece, Ajayi said he sits with it for several minutes, alone. He interprets the message to himself before he interprets it for anyone else. Then, asked what he wanted viewers to carry after they walked away from the work, he said: "You don't have to watch somebody's template to live your own life. You just have to keep going at your pace, trusting your path, and whatever you believe in, you just have to keep going ahead with that faith."
Discover more of Olumide Ajayi's work and available pieces on their Studio profile.