[Focus] Tomide Akinshola, “Solemn Dialogue”, 2025

Tomide Akinshola, “Solemn Dialogue”, 2025, Acrylic on canvas, ink, 121 × 121 × 5 cm

A woman sits beside her dog in a carefully staged interior. The composition is frontal, stable, almost monumental. Vertical stripes, dense foliage, ribbed tights, red drapery and graphic blinds divide the surface into bold and distinct planes. The accumulation of patterns produces a collage-like effect where the space feels assembled.

This emphasis on textiles and surface recalls the historical function of fabric in portraiture. In royal and aristocratic painting, richly rendered garments signaled power, status and identity. Here, Tomide Akinshola transposes that visual logic into a contemporary domestic setting. The everyday scene takes on the gravity of a modern portrait of authority. Pattern and material presence elevate the subject, granting dignity and symbolic weight to an ordinary moment.

Tomide Akinshola (b. 1995, Ondo, Nigeria) lives and works in Lagos. Raised in a family of crop farmers and trained in Fine and Applied Arts Education at Obafemi Awolowo University, he has developed a figurative practice centered on identity and human relationships. His exaggerated facial features, particularly the nose, stem from childhood experiences of teasing and have become emblems of resilience and self-definition. By monumentalizing the ordinary, Tomide Akinshola asserts that identity, intimacy and personal history deserve the same visual authority once reserved for kings and nobles.