Good art tells a story; great art immerses the viewer in the story so well that the boundary between observer and spectacle dissolves. This is the distinctive genius of artist and illustrator, Sef Adeola, who has honed a surgical skill for bringing stories to life in a visual dimension that adds depth and resonance to its graphic import. His images do not merely supplement a text; they add layers of subtextual and cultural resonance that transform the act of observation into witnessing.
As readers, our most acute sense is our eyes, which suddenly become not only an inlet for aesthetic appreciation, but a visual roadmap to guide us through Adeola’s labyrinthine worlds. In his iconic compositions, Adeola aims for an animation of emotions only translatable as unwritten and unspoken. Perhaps the most prominent signature of his work is a hypnotic, repeating motif of flowers, geometric patterns, celestial symbols, and traditional (African) mosaic often used as a background, or more elaborately in its sense, a foreground to depict an interior constellation.
In his images for the inaugural issue of LOLWE, Adeola’s work acts as a semiotic bridge. For instance, the image for Mòje Ikpeme’s story, “Tell Me Something Happy,” is a haunting visual of a female character holding a razor blade and appears to groom her eyelashes with it. It is a jarring metaphor that captures the blurred lines between self-care and self-harm—the central tension of the protagonist, Iripia, who is in a toxic relationship with Henry. Adeola visualises the illusion of Iripia making herself perfect for her lover, a romantic plight which seems indistinguishable from hurting herself. In the whirlpool effect he uses in the image, we see the character entrapped in her cycle of abuse. Such attention is not an uncommon element in Adeola’s work, as captured in his recent curation for Bàtá magazine’s first issue. In fact, if one sits longer with his images, one begins to engage in a silent conversation with the penumbral scenes his silhouettes portray.
Similar distortions of this feminine character captured in Mòje Ikpeme’s story are also illustrated in other works of LOLWE Issue I: Sibongile Fisher’s “A Road Called Love,” and Ifeanyi Ekpunobi’s “The Testimony.” In the image for Sibongile’s short story, the background is a repeating pattern of serpentine, mermaid figures, a nod to the mami wata or feminine water spirits in West African mythologies. These creatures, often symbolic of danger, seduction, or wealth, placed against the agonising portrait of a pregnant woman with blood dripping from her seemingly cut womb, speak to the spiritual and physical burdens of intimacy. But this is easier said than illustrated—how does one illustrate the burden of a spirit? Adeola does not answer this, but his attempt at creating such a visual environment is heavy with a psychic presence commensurate with Sibongile’s story.
Adeola solves narrative puzzles using a logic that isn’t just background effect, but which creates a visual frequency where each element is a collected tension—as captured in the illustration for “Self-Portrait With Anxiety & Other Poems” (Precious Arinze). For Adeola, space is never emptiness. He evokes this tautness of tension through a fracture of form (a cracked skull, or psyche) in Ifeanyi Ekpunobi’s story, which follows a man grappling his past with a woman who left him for the convent, and his re-marriage to Zoba, a woman agitated by the expectation of giving birth to a male child. In Adeola’s image for this story, the quills in the background are not static; they illustrate the promise of wind and opened skies, even as she remains tightly bound to the obligations meant to keep her grounded.
The textile-esque aesthetic that often occupies Adeola’s work registers a wealth of diverse African cultures. From a girl’s woven, patterned hairstyle to the colourful, printed or dyed fabrics used to clothe her; to the deep river waters that make whorls and eddies; to the fan of palm leaves, and the murals on mud walls. When landscape intersects culture, Adeola’s illustrations are born. In the image for Moshood’s essay “Dreams of My Father,” the subject’s hairdo is set against a mosaic of masks. The hairstyle can be said to be a bridge to her ancestors, a literal translation of “carrying one’s history” on one’s head. In “Ghazal in Nakedness,” the art stands as a mirror to the exposed body described in Honora Ankong’s poetry.
Today, where cybertextuality is an important medium of communication, an illustration is more than a decoration, but a semiotic bridge for a visual reality with words and languages. For an African illustrator, particularly one living in the West, art is a political act. It is a political stance against a society reduced to flat, tragic tropes of suffering, poverty and tyranny. But Adeola refuses to be reduced to an ethnographic gaze. Where there is an undeclared pressure to produce work that functions as a mere mistranslation of trauma or the illegible retellings of the African experience, Adeola’s oeuvre is a bold resistance. The image for “The Colour of Grief” (Iyanuoluwa Adenle), for example, is painted white with, perhaps, a blooming lotus flower, rather than art merely evoking melancholia.
In “Dear Moon, I Am the Colour of Water” (Alain Jules Hirwa), Adeola uses silhouette to visualise the illegible thoughts of the persona in the essay. The silhouette is not a shield or a disguise; it is a revelation that the character does not refuse to inhabit the spaces that light holds. This is the remarkable sophistication that Adeola’s work preaches: a sermon on self-actualisation.
Society often demands we succumb to the conventional, but Sef Adeola taps into his interiority, using the digital space, to tell a tale where African heritage is not a relic of the past, but a living thing. As Nigerian digital artist, Davida Enara, says: “African art is a viable means for us to reclaim and maintain autonomy when it comes to how our stories are told . . . as a continent that has undergone a great deal of loss and trauma both from within and outside the continent’s borders. However, I don’t think the purpose of African art should be relegated to just a reactionary one.”
Adeola’s images are an expression of a folk, rhythmic survival. He seeks to not just tell a story, but to immerse his audience in a visceral experience, and not just performance. His work is a reminder of the urgency to take the fragments of a fractured history and reassemble them as a living archive of Africanness and African digital art. A visual manifesto that has arrived timely in an era of chaos.♦
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Adesiyan Oluwapelumi, TPC XI, is a medical student, poet, and essayist. He is the poetry editor of Fiery Scribe Review.