In Abstracto, In Concreto brings together works by Tunji Adeniyi-Jones, Luke Agada, Ludovic Nkoth, and Naïla Opiangah. Working across figuration and abstraction, the artists explore questions of memory, identity, inheritance and belonging through distinct painterly languages shaped by African diasporic experience.
Brice Arsène Yonkeu notes:
“The exhibition is less concerned with depicting bodies in recognizable form than with asking how the body — sometimes present, sometimes dissolving, sometimes displaced — becomes a vessel for history, inheritance, and imagination.”
On view are two oil paintings by Tunji Adeniyi-Jones whose vivid palettes recall the chromatic intensity of Matisse. In Orange Sentinel, a mythic figure drawn from Yoruba spiritual traditions emerges through dense foliage, one arm extended toward the viewer. In Blue Fragments, the figures often central to Adeniyi-Jones’s practice dissolve into a layered field of blue leaves, turning the canvas into a self-contained world.
Three works by Luke Agada span the breadth of his practice. Thresholds is divided by a horizontal line across which forms contort, merge and dissolve, moving between figuration and abstraction. Synapses No. 33 and Synapses No. 34, charcoal on canvas works, unfold through dense, architectural compositions that suggest thought, memory and transmission.
In Ludovic Nkoth’s Smoke Break, three figures gather around a table in a setting left deliberately undefined. Through layered oil painting and flattened perspective, Nkoth show figures pausing to exist for a moment outside the demands of movement and negotiation.
Naïla Opiangah ore fields 1 and ore fields 2 see faceless female-coded forms emerge through layered oil, graphite, charcoal and solvent. In the monumental Victoire. Passé., bodies overlap and accumulate in theatrical groupings, while Mold et Poussière 2 distils a similar visual language on a more intimate scale.
Across the exhibition, the works resist fixed readings, holding space for ambiguity, opacity, and transformation. They echo Édouard Glissant’s idea of opacity — the right to remain partially unknowable — while also reflecting James Baldwin’s belief that identity is shaped through confrontation with history. Together, the artists consider how memory, inheritance, and imagination shape both individual and collective experience.
Press release from Efie Gallery
Image: Tunji Adeniyi-Jones. Blue Fragments. 2026. Oil painting. 153.67 x 101.6 cm. Photography by JSP Art Photography. Image of courtesy the artist
