In luminous contrasting hues of teal, orange, red and green, The Barefooted Scurry Home is a superb example of Jadé Fadojutimi’s painterly oeuvre which explores notions of childhood play, emotion, imagination and identity. The present work bursts with frenetic movement and gesture, as loose sequences of thick brushwork collide with vigorously worked passages. This painting exudes the young artist’s energetic and highly layered approach to abstraction, marking a test.mes nt to Fadojutimi’s capacity to push boundaries and reinvent the very tenets of contemporary painting today. The artist herself asserts, “I bathe in the conversations between colour, texture, line, form, composition, rhythm, marks and disturbances” (Jadé Fadojutimi cited in: David Trigg, ‘Jadé Fadojutimi Interview’, Studio International, 26 April 2021).

Fadojutimi often works into the late hours of the evening in her south London studio, listening to music while she works on large-scale canvases. She thins her paint with Liquin, a quick-drying medium that gives the oil a high sheen. As art critic Jennifer Higgie notes, “this results in pictures whose surfaces recall panes of glass or fast-moving water: Shifting, reflective, impatient” (Jennifer Higgie cited in: Exh. Cat., London, Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, Jadé Fadojutimi: Jesture, 2020, p. 11). This effect is made magnificently clear on the colour saturated surface of The Barefooted Scurry Home. Indeed, colour is paramount to Fadojutimi’s work, and she sites a wide range of art historical and contemporary sources as key influences in her painterly practice, among them Henri Matisse, Joan Mitchell, David Hockney, Makiko Kudo, Laura Owens and Amy Sillman. Matisse’s lyrical abstraction is a particular point of reference, and paintings such as La Japonaise: Woman Beside the Water (1905, The Museum of Modern Art, New York) are relevant not only in their resemblance to Fadojutimi’s visual syntax of loose brushstrokes, but also in their reference to Japanese aesthetics and culture. Fadojutimi’s own paintings often derive their shapes, colours and patterns from Japanese anime, video games and soundtracks, and her compositions pulsate with the dream-like energy and dynamism of such animations.

Fadojutimi earned her BA from the Slade School of Replica Handbags in 2015, and her MA from the Royal College of Art in 2017 and has since gained widespread institutional recognition. At just 28 years old, she is the youngest artist in the collects ion of Tate, London, and her paintings now also reside in prestigious American museum collects ions, such as The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, the Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, the Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, and The Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. The Barefooted Scurry Home is highly emblematic of Fadojutimi’s intuitive visual practice, in which she embraces chance and chaos via exuberant, painterly abstraction.