The Leg Stayed In
By MasterArt
There is a leg in Hidden Burden that almost didn't make it. MasterArt had been working on the piece, adjusting the face, trimming the denim edges, stepping back three paces to check the balance, and at some point the leg became a problem. The form wasn't sitting right. He considered cutting it. Then he kept it. "I kept the leg because the actor was actually talking about when I had a leg issue," he told me, "so I actually thought I should keep it." The actor, in this case, was himself.
MasterArt works from a studio in Ibadan, Nigeria, where he builds figurative compositions by layering acrylic paint over recycled denim on canvas. He graduated from Ladoke Akintola University of Technology in Ogbomoso earlier this year with a degree in Fine and Applied Arts, and the work he made during that final stretch — including Hidden Burden, Togetherness, and path of Growth — reads as the first coherent body of practice from someone who has found a material that answers back. The denim is not decoration. It is structural, textural, and, for MasterArt, biographical. A leg fracture during his studies pushed him toward the fabric. He describes denim as a symbol of endurance, which can sound like a press-release line until you understand that the injury is literally in the work, held in place by the same material he uses to hold everything else together.
The face in Hidden Burden gave him the most trouble. When I asked what specifically wasn't working, the answer came back in pieces: it was the emotion, then the layering, then the edges around the face. He changed the denim at the perimeter of the face and stepped back about three steps before it clicked. "It was about balance and composition," he said. The final anchor was paint, applied last, which caught the light in a way that confirmed the piece was done. He works under natural light and keeps it constant throughout a session. The light, he said, is what told him where to stop.
Hidden Burden (2025, denim and acrylic on canvas) shows a figure carrying weight that the composition refuses to name directly. The leg — the one he nearly removed — sits in the lower register of the canvas, connected at the wrist to the rest of the figure in a way that took him time to resolve. Once that connection was right, he said, the whole piece settled. The emotion it landed on was the one he had been aiming for from the start: not tension exactly, but the specific heaviness of something carried so long it has become structural. The background texture, which he had used in earlier work, felt familiar enough to give him control over the surface without flattening it. He described it as feeling bulky at first, then steady. Steadiness, in his account, is not a passive quality. It is the result of sustained pressure on the material.
That process of confirmation — moving back from the canvas to see whether the thing holds — is central to how he describes his practice. He is not a painter who works intuitively and explains afterward. He has a clear image before he starts and measures the finished piece against it. When I asked whether path of Growth surprised him at any point, he said it didn't, that he was expecting it to feel smooth, and it did. "Perfection, so looking exactly how I felt," was how he put it. There is confidence in that, and also a certain pressure: when you know what you're aiming for, falling short is harder to rationalize.
Hidden Burden and Togetherness were conceived as a sequence, the first piece leaving something unresolved that the second was meant to address. He described it plainly: the series worked like a two-part film, with Hidden Burden as part one and Togetherness as part two. The emotion that stayed unresolved after the first piece was what pushed him into the second. To get there, he pushed the layering before he pushed the color, and the shift that came out of it was permanent. The indigo of the denim, which had been working at one register, moved to something bolder. That change in how he used the fabric's own color carried forward into path of Growth, where the layering felt, by his account, smoother than anything he'd made before.
He is twenty-five and has been working professionally for five years, which means he started building a practice while still in secondary school. A student exhibition in Ibadan in 2018 was his first public showing, and the work then was already focused on portraiture. The consistency of that focus is notable: he has not drifted between disciplines or periods. The figure is always there. What has changed is what the figure carries. Early portraits were about observation. The current work is about concealment — specifically what people carry that doesn't show on the surface, and how the right material arrangement can make that weight visible without naming it.
The denim resists. It refuses to dry on time, he said, which slows the work down in ways he can't fully control. When I asked what he does during those waiting periods, he said he thinks about the next piece. That is how Hidden Burden began — in the gap between finishing one canvas and being able to touch another. There is something useful in that structure, a forced pause that becomes planning, though MasterArt didn't frame it that way. He stated it as fact.
At the Exhibitmosho 2026 exhibition, MasterArt showed two works: Silent Weight and Togetherness. The pairing was deliberate. Both works use recycled denim and acrylic on canvas to examine what he calls the unseen psychological burdens carried by individuals — the same territory as Hidden Burden, but approached from the angle of shared experience rather than solitary endurance. Togetherness in particular came partly from exchanges with viewers of earlier work, people who told him their own stories in response to what they had seen. He didn't claim that as a method. It was an example of the process being porous in one direction: incoming stories sometimes shape the next piece, sometimes don't. He was honest about the inconsistency.
He also participated in a 2025 group exhibition under the theme "Print of My Soul," where he showed two works from a flower girl series — a departure from the weighted figuration of the Hidden Burden sequence, though still working in the same materials. The LAUTECH Final Year Art Showcase the same year presented a broader collection of mixed-media works investigating identity and emotion. Outside the gallery context, he painted live in front of over two thousand people at a finance conference in Lagos, and he led an art outreach program for more than sixty orphaned children, teaching handmade art. He also made a commissioned portrait of former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo and was covered by the Nigerian Tribune. These are not the credentials of someone building slowly toward a first show. The public-facing work is already varied and, in some cases, high-stakes.
What the work asks of viewers, according to MasterArt, is reflection. The signal he watches for — to know whether a piece has landed — is not silence or tears or social media reach. It is questions, and more specifically, people telling him about their own experiences in relation to what they have seen. When those stories come in, he listens differently to his own work. "Them telling me about a story or one of their past experiences that relates with their work" is what tells him the connection happened. The work that became Togetherness came partly from that kind of exchange, but he didn't present it as a system.
The familiarity of the denim — a material most people have worn and washed and worn again — is part of what makes the portraits work at a distance before the viewer knows anything about how they're made. Up close, the texture is the argument. The fabric sits under the paint in a way that gives the surface a weight that straight paint on canvas doesn't have. MasterArt said keeping that surface steady is work, and that he does it for himself as much as for anyone looking. The steadiness is not a gift to the audience. It is a discipline he maintains, and the audience benefits from it, but the primary obligation is to the piece.
"It was from my own experience," he said, when I asked whether Hidden Burden drew on personal memory or was shaped toward the viewer's. The response lined up with what viewers brought back to him, and he found that reassuring — not about the theme, he said, but about the material. The denim held what he put into it.
Discover more of MasterArt 's work and available pieces on their Studio profile.