In the last few months, Art Pantheon has proven to be uncommonly active, showing three exhibitions, with premium quality art pieces from artists across the country.

Building on that foundation of showing quality art, the facility recently brought five artists into a small space for aesthetics and critical engagement.

Titled, A Room With All Our Things, the groupshow featured works of Toju Clarke, Abisola Gbadamosi, Tolulope Daramola, Paul Ayihawu and Samuel Vittu.

Clarke, a painter who employs sgraffito, a form of decoration made by scratching through a surface to reveal a lower layer of a contrasting colour, typically done in plaster or stucco on walls, or in slip on ceramics before firing.

Gbadamosi, a visual and multidisciplinary artist, brings to her canvases, a distinctly feminine energy. She employs whorls, a pattern of spirals or concentric circles; curves and colours to draw audience into a bold and sensuous world. Her painting showcases dreams and undying desires.

Daramola, in his realistic portraits, employs dark-toned colours to evoke the moodier sides of the human psyche. The subjects of his paintings are often sombre, contemplative. Their eyes, skin tones, and aspects evince an air of melancholy. In their faces, painted against ordinary everyday settings, the audiences glimpse the deeper textures of human experience.

Ayihawu, a realist painter of stillness and emotion, puts at his service colour, tone and texture to create portraits of quiet, riveting power. His paintings instil us with silence.

Vittu, in paintings like A Gentle Man’s Rose and This Side of Heaven, shows the textures and colours of comfort and aspiration. His paintings are rendered with pastel tones for the background, with warm colours for the heads of his animal-face subjects and soft bright ones for their clothes.

The subjects in his paintings are sure of their place in the world. And Vittu paints them with such affection that endears art lovers towards them.

Director/curator of The Art Pantheon Gallery, Nana Sonoiki, said the exhibition offered a room of varied presences, moods and effects. She noted that the exhibition made apparent, what a shared space of mutual recognition and consolation could be, probing into the possibilities such a space can unlock.

“Their voices are different, their styles unique, but in A Room with All Our Things, these five artists have fashioned a common space for us all, a room of their things, and ours,” she said.

Speaking with The Guardian on her work, Gbadamosi, a water-colourist, who is exhibiting her works for the first time, said: “I am trying to make people think about themselves and at the same time they should understand that no matter what they are going through, there is light at the end of the tunnel. I started drawing with my mom when I was three-year-old and it gave me a chance to escape into a fantasy world.

“Most of my paintings come from my personal life experiences. And my works is also influenced by my spiritual journey.”
Speaking on one of her works, Love Affairs, she said: “I see the death of my parents as a blessing rather than punishment and I feel like if everyone can look at life that way, it will go a long way to unburden the mind.”