HOLD

My paintings investigate a simple but persistent question: how does a structure retain itself under competing forces? Rather than representing people, places or narratives, each painting examines what happens when opposing movements occupy the same pictorial space. Every mark becomes both an act of construction and an act of disruption.

The works are built through repeated encounters between colour, direction and gesture. Layers are introduced, interrupted, obscured and redistributed until no single element dominates the surface. Structure emerges not from fixed geometry but through negotiation between competing forces. Stability, when it appears, is never permanent; it is held in tension and continually tested by new interventions. What remains visible is the evidence of that negotiation rather than an image of certainty.

Across the exhibition, the paintings occupy different structural conditions. Some appear compressed by converging forces, others seem to expand, fracture, redistribute or recover. These are not sequential illustrations but variations within the same enquiry. Each painting asks whether a form can maintain coherence while continually absorbing collision, displacement and change. The works therefore operate less as portraits or abstractions than as fields in which structural resilience is tested.

This exhibition presents an evolving visual language that understands painting as a site of active resistance rather than description. The paintings do not offer conclusions. Instead, they invite viewers to witness the fragile moment in which order is neither fixed nor lost, but constantly negotiated under competing forces.

-Idowu Sholanke