The Weight of an Empty Jerrycan
By Iyanuoluwa Babalola
There is a painting Iyanuoluwa Babalola has not made yet. He knows the first symbol he will put down: a lantern. He knows the figure reaching toward it will come from his own life. He knows the background will be rough, not smooth, because smooth would lie about what the experience actually felt like. The piece is about addiction, his own, and he spoke about it with the directness of someone who has decided that the awareness matters more than the privacy. He said it was not easy, but that he found his way through, and that God helped him find it. He is 32, based in Lagos, and still finishing the body of work that comes before this one.
That sequencing matters to him. Babalola does not jump between ideas. He completes things. His current series, four large acrylic-on-canvas portraits completed in 2026, carries Yoruba names as titles: Ayọ̀délé, Adúkẹ́ Ọlà, Àsàbí, Ẹwàtómí. Each name is a statement in itself: "Joy Has Come Home," "Beloved Crowned with Wealth," "Embodiment of Culture," "Beauty Is Enough for Me." The naming is deliberate. Babalola trained in Fine and Applied Arts at Emmanuel Alayande College of Education in Oyo State and later at Adeyemi Federal University of Education in Ondo State, but his working vocabulary is rooted in something that preceded both institutions: a childhood in which Yoruba heritage, its symbols, its oral weight, its marks on skin and memory, was simply the air around him.
The piece that brought the roughness question into focus is called The Resilience, or as he referred to it in conversation, "the model of resilience." It is about his mother. After his father died suddenly when the children were very young, she carried the household forward without the family friends who had promised support ever making good on those promises. The children felt the difficulty without fully understanding it. What they understood was physical: the jerrycans. The family had no running water. They would carry the empty cans to a public tap, light enough to lift with one finger, and return with them full, heavy enough that two hands were not always enough. He described the sensation precisely and without drama. "I could feel the weight," he said.
That weight became the governing logic of the canvas. The jerrycans appear in the painting as direct symbols, placed among the composition's main objects to carry the emotional load that the background alone could not. Babalola normally works toward smooth blends, what he calls naturalistic painting. For The Resilience, he used a pass-through method on the background, building up a surface that reads as rough, unresolved, resistant. He stopped the background not because it was finished but because he knew it was time to move to the main figures. The stopping was instinct, not calculation. He said he had not planned to work that way, that his inclination is always toward smooth blending, but that he understood mid-process that a smooth ground would not communicate the experience to someone standing in front of the canvas without him there to explain it. What the rough surface gave him was legibility without explanation: the audience could feel something about the weight before they read a word.
That shift from smooth to rough opened something for him technically. He described realizing that he could be a naturalistic painter and an impasto painter, or both at once, depending on what the piece required. The decision is now message-led rather than style-led. For the coming addiction piece, he expects to use rough effects again, because the experience he is describing was not easy to move through. The composition as he has it in his head places the figure low in the frame, in darkness, with the lantern above and ahead, and the figure's direction oriented toward the light. He plans to include symbols of different kinds of addiction alongside his own story, because he understands that the personal entry point is a door, not the whole room.
That question of presence and absence runs through how he thinks about the work more broadly. At LIMCAF in 2025, where he reached the national Top 100 finalists and appeared in the exhibition catalogue, he showed three pieces, one of which involved a childhood encounter with ants. He had wanted to include the scars from that encounter but left them off the canvas. The story behind the omission is specific: he had disturbed an ant colony as a boy, not knowing that certain ants, the ones with what he called "cheeks," were more aggressive than the others. When they fought back, he fell and was injured. He chose not to paint the scars, reasoning that he could address them through an artist statement or in conversation at an exhibition. On the canvas, he left the gap open.
The response at the LIMCAF regional show confirmed something. Viewers began offering their own stories: encounters with dogs, with ducks, with other animals, with consequences they had not expected. The unfinished detail had become an opening. When he summarized what had happened, his answer was a single word: "Exactly." He has been working this way more consciously since, holding things back on purpose, letting the image stay incomplete enough that the viewer has somewhere to go. It is a different instinct from his earlier approach, and he is aware of the shift.
The LIMCAF appearances across 2023 and 2025 represent a sustained engagement with that competition's structure rather than a one-off entry. He first showed in the LIMCAF Regional Exhibition in 2023 with a piece called Fix It. In 2025 he returned with Can We Breathe? at the regional level, then advanced to the national finals, where he placed in the Top 100 and was included in the official exhibition catalogue. He described the national finals as a significant moment, one that confirmed the work was reaching audiences beyond his immediate community in Lagos. The Visionary Voice 3.0 exhibition in Lagos the same year, and the ExhibitMOSHO show in Ogbomoso in 2026, extended that reach further. He also placed as a Top 6 finalist in the Step Up Nigeria Whistleblower Competition in 2026. Across these appearances, the work has been consistent in its concerns: healing, cultural memory, the moral weight of personal experience made visible through Yoruba symbolism.
When he described his process of checking whether a piece is communicating, he talked about inviting people into the studio, not to give feedback exactly, but to speak about what they see before he says anything about what he intended. He described noticing, repeatedly, that what they described aligned with what he had been trying to express. He takes some corrections and ignores others. "It's not all the corrections or all the criticism that needs to be adjusted," he said. What he keeps and what he discards depends on where he thinks the piece needs to end.
His practice has a therapeutic dimension he does not treat as secondary. It is the primary frame. He describes painting as a tool for working through experience, his own and, by extension, other people's. The Yoruba symbols that recur across his work, tribal marks, fruits, names that carry meaning in their syllables, serve a similar function. They are specific enough to be real and open enough to travel. Babalola has been painting for over ten years and working professionally for more than five. He began under his father's early recognition of his talent, trained formally through two institutions, and has continued building through studio practice, facilitation work at Sip & Paint events with thirty-five to fifty participants, and programs like the Lighthouse Bootcamp in 2025, an intensive focused on artistic discipline and innovation in contemporary practice.
What he is still working out, and said so directly, is the balance between his own feeling and what an audience can receive. He described it as sometimes difficult, a gap that does not always close easily. His method when it does not close is to wait, to hold the piece, to gather his thoughts, and then find the way back in. He described looking for his emotions on the canvas, looking for what he was going through at the time, and then looking for the way out. That phrase, the way out, is the one he returned to most often across the conversation. It applies to the addiction piece in the most literal sense. It applies to the jerrycans, to his mother's silence, to the unfinished scar, to the rough ground under every smooth figure he has ever painted.
"I look for awareness. I look for my emotions. I look for what I was going through at that time. Then I look for the way out."
Discover more of Iyanuoluwa Babalola's work and available pieces on their Studio profile.