What Holds the Truth of the Work

There was a moment during the making of Adesewa when Faith Gbadero nearly ruined it. He had been working toward something cleaner, tighter, more controlled, and in doing so had started removing the very things that made the painting alive. The rawness. The slight imbalance. The parts that hadn't settled into resolution. He caught himself, stepped back, and left them in. The piece, completed in 2025 in oil on canvas, is now among the most direct statements in his portfolio.

"There was a point where I almost stripped the page down too much," he told me, "trying to make it more perfect, cleaner, and controlled. But in that process, I nearly removed the attention that gave Adeshewa its life. The rawness, the slight imbalance, the parts that felt unresolved — those were the very things holding the truth of the work."

Gbadero, twenty-seven, lives and works in Ogbomoso, a city in Oyo State in southwestern Nigeria. He studied at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, one of Nigeria's more rigorous fine arts programmes, and has been exhibiting since 2019. His medium is oil and acrylic on canvas, sometimes charcoal and pastel. His subjects are almost always human figures, rendered with enough detail to feel present and enough restraint to feel withheld. The figures in his work are rarely fully revealed. They carry a sense of interior weight that the surface doesn't fully explain.

That quality is not accidental. Gbadero describes himself as drawn to the in-between — moments that don't announce themselves, feelings that people carry without naming. His 2025 work ÌRÈTÍỌ̀LA, shown alongside Adesewa in his recent portfolio, operates in the same register. He described the two paintings as quiet reflections of human experience, each carrying its own emotional weight while remaining in conversation with the other. Adesewa, he said, holds a sense of immediacy, like a moment where emotions rise to the surface and refuse to be hidden. ÌRÈTÍỌ̀LA pulls in a different direction — more interior, more still. Where Adesewa is about the courage it takes to remain exposed, ÌRÈTÍỌ̀LA is about what accumulates in the silence before that exposure happens.

His 2024 work Echoes Within, acrylic on canvas, extends this. The title signals the preoccupation: not what is visible, but what reverberates beneath it. The painting returns to a single figure caught in a state of internal reckoning — not performing emotion for a viewer, but absorbed in something the viewer is only partially permitted to see. Across his recent output, the figures he paints are often caught in states of becoming rather than arrival. They are not portraits in any conventional sense. They don't document. They sit with something.

The making of Adesewa also involved a second crisis, distinct from the compositional one. Beyond the question of what to leave in the background, Gbadero found himself pulling back emotionally — softening an expression before it became too exposed, protecting himself from the weight of what the painting was asking him to put down. He described the temptation clearly: to make the work safer, more managed, less nakedly felt. He held the line. The painting exists as he made it, unresolved edges and all, and he said that doing otherwise would have made it less honest. The emotional self-disclosure involved in finishing Adesewa cost him something, and the painting shows it.

Gbadero's exhibition record spans several years of group shows across Nigerian and online platforms. He placed second runner-up at the Azgour Art Exhibition in 2023, the same year he appeared in When It Is Quiet, a virtual group exhibition through Dore Collective, and in Yoruba ni mi, a show centred on Yoruba cultural identity. The latter is worth noting in the context of his practice: his titles often carry Yoruba language and meaning, and his figures, though not always explicitly located in a specific cultural setting, carry the weight of that inheritance. Adesewa and Adebimpe are both Yoruba names, and the choice to title works after people — or the idea of people — says something about how he thinks about his subjects. They are not types or symbols. They are specific, even when unnamed.

The Yoruba ni mi exhibition in 2023 was a particular marker. Gbadero said the show pressed him to think about what it meant to work from within a specific cultural inheritance rather than simply alongside it. His practice had always drawn on African cultural narratives and lived experience, but the exhibition asked him to be more deliberate about that relationship — to consider how Yoruba ideas of identity, collectivity, and resilience were structural ones, shaping how he composed figures, how he used negative space, and how much he was willing to leave unresolved on the canvas.

In 2024, Saatchi Art included him as a featured artist, which widened his reach beyond the Nigerian circuit. He has also been featured in The Movee, an art publication, and won the Titan in You competition in 2021 and the 9jaart Face Off competition in 2020. None of this adds up to a stratospheric CV, but it describes an artist who has been building steadily, showing consistently, and refining a practice that has a clear internal logic.

That logic has a lot to do with restraint. When asked whether the tension between revealing and holding back was something he expected to keep working with, his answer came quickly. "Yes, it's something I don't think I can move away from. And, honestly, I don't want to," he said. "The tension between revealing and holding back feels like a truthful place to work from." He described how human beings exist in a kind of permanent in-between state, choosing what to show and what to protect, and said that space was where he found the most honesty. He is not interested in resolving the tension. In his future work, he said, he sees himself learning to sit with it more comfortably rather than trying to close it down.

His artist statement describes a practice rooted in minimalism and symbolism — minimal compositions used to communicate complex inner states and unspoken truths. That description fits what the paintings actually do. Love & Bond III, another 2025 work in oil on canvas, approaches connection not as something declared but as something felt in the space between figures. The bond the title names is not illustrated by gesture or proximity alone; it lives in what the composition withholds as much as in what it shows. Gbadero has said he is drawn to simplicity as a language, and in this painting the restraint is structural — the composition refuses to over-explain what the figures mean to each other, and that refusal is where the painting's weight comes from.

He has been making art since childhood, though he counts his professional practice as running about four years. The distinction matters to him. There is a difference, in his telling, between drawing as a private habit and committing to the work as a sustained inquiry. The inquiry, as it stands now, is into what he calls the in-between moments — the parts of life that are not always celebrated or spoken about, yet shape who we are. His artist statement puts it plainly: he is interested in silence, restraint, and the weight of things left unsaid. The paintings are not illustrations of those ideas. They are attempts to hold them.

Working from Ogbomoso, he is not embedded in the gallery infrastructure of Lagos or Abuja, the cities that tend to dominate Nigerian contemporary art's external visibility. That distance may be part of what gives the work its particular quality of stillness. There is no sense of the market in these paintings, no pitch toward a particular collector taste. The figures he paints are not performing. They are simply there, carrying whatever they carry, and the viewer is left to meet them without much guidance.

"Sometimes what is withheld speaks just as loudly as what is revealed," he said, completing a thought he had started earlier in our conversation. "Because sometimes what is withheld speaks — just as loudly as what is revealed."

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