Sef Adeola’s images capture an African artistic imagination dating back to our ancestors’ earliest exploration of sculpture. To those craftsmen, it seemed—as still the case today—artistic depictions that assumed any life-form, be it humanoid or animal, was rendered with distortion. The artistic imagination was thought of as a spiritual encounter, which to depict was a mere attempt in translating the abstract into the graspable. Although this might seem like a stretch, it is there in Adeola’s work, which relies mostly on a distortion of sight in his overbearing signature of silhouettes. He doesn’t allow us see very much, and that is the trick; he simply evokes a séance, trying to wrest meaning from meaningless, so that the gaze for the viewer is that of witnessing a shared secret, not essentially discreet, but a you-know-it-when-you-see-it secret, pleasure for the inner eye.
Although I’d first seen Sef Adeola’s work when he illustrated a queer cover image for The Question Marker in June 2019, I was properly introduced to his work—or rather the popular style which he is now known for—in June 2020 when the first LOLWE issue was released, which included, memorably, the short story “Hall Silicon” by Michelle Enehiwealu Iruobe, and photography by Kamal Obat; the latter which I wrote about here in 2021. Adeola was the commissioning artist for most of the stories in that issue and I remember that out of the many images, I was taken by the one used for Som Adedayor’s nonfiction “Distance of Days.” This appreciation was purely aesthetic without any connection to the nonfiction about a friend recalling the loss of a classmate, a very young woman. Here is the thing: you have a silhouette portrait of lady, a white background, and a patterned grid of rose flower. There you have it. Nearly simplistic. But enough. This is digital abstraction. But what’s even more interesting, Adeola does this over and over—a silhouette, a background, a pattern—yet the appeal remains, whereby many, including organisations, have become interested in his digital art. Every once in a while, he illustrates for a magazine or institution, and it has become almost impossible to see his footprint on the Internet without instant recognition.
His most recent appearance are images for the inaugural issue, Ìsọmọlórúkọ, of the new Yoruba-language-focused Bàtá Magazine. Ìsọmọlórúkọ is the practice of child-naming among the Yoruba; five poems in this issue attend this subject matter, and Adeola’s accompanying five images. The first poem, “Ìgbà-Ǹ-Bá Jó, Onílù Dágbére Aké” by Qudus Ọlánrewájú Òjíkùtù, is a very interesting monologue of a dancer who waits for the best drummer of her time, only to be forsook at the ripest hour before the dance, as the drummer declares being summoned to another village: “A sage-drummer came to us in Akéte, / they called her the seductress of rhythms. / I had braced myself / to cleave the air in my familiar style.” We see this cleaving of the air in Adeola’s image in the footwork of the silhouetted form, almost quite literally. And in the subject’s leg suspension, one sees the unfinished dream of the dancer.
In the last poem, “Kò Sí Enikẹ́ni Tí N So” by Titilayo Matiku, the accompanying image is the silhouette of a toddler reaching out its hand to a bee. This is an interaction with the lines, “When a child is born, they place / a drop of honey in his mouth / but none (sic) tells him that life is not always / sweet . . .” Yet somehow, the element of wonder and an interred beauty remains visible in this image, even as Adeola tries to depict precarity. This is in the poetry of both silhouetted forms meeting each other: the unassuming, protean form of the toddler and the verisimilitude of the bee; in a sense, the naïve meeting the world’s capitalism, or, the one in search of wonder plunged into labour, and so on, so that if you contemplate the image further, it might keep revealing itself. Curiously, while the poem is titled “No One Tells,” Adeola’s image is titled “Baby and The Bee.”
However, one cannot place the uniform colour palette (magenta and chalky yellow) Adeola uses for this series, in relation to the magazine’s theme of “Naming”; colours, of course, having their own semiotics, and as we have seen him use them accordingly in his other works, be it to better accentuate theme or subject, or for their aesthetic value. Nevertheless, Sef Adeola will always have a new outing for us, as his hard work has now proven. Emmanuel Esomnofu already describes him as “an assured hand who has trained himself in this delicate art.” Surely, most of digital art today are a sort of a millennial conversation about artistic expression and the current world of virtual reality, given that many of these artists, as Sef Adeola, are quite often of the same millennial generation (think of Osinachi who has mastered a style of digital art, simply using Word Processor); every design, every concept or imagination, is a language, an addition in that conversation in how we use digital art to interpret our lives and aspirations, or even tell a story, as we find in Adeola’s digital abstractions.♦
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Carl Terver is the author of Glory to the Sky, and founding editor of Afapinen. He was longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2024.