Jamiu Agboke

Sea View is pleased to present If the Ground Could Speak, the US debut solo exhibition by London-based artist Jamiu Agboke (b. 1989, Lagos, Nigeria). A continuation of the artist’s intuitive exploration of emotive landscape abstractions, the exhibition presents fifteen new paintings of large and intimate scale.

Rather than capturing a particular place or time, Agboke’s atmospheric paintings excavate a particular feeling or sensation. In the spirit of impressionism, Agboke’s process is intuitive and internal, where the external environment acts as a mirror for the perceived human experience. As Claude Monet wrote, “I would like to paint the way a bird sings.”

From afar, Abgoke’s uncalculated yet mesmeric use of brushwork and color resembles idyllic and wild countrysides, whereas up close, they unfurl as disorienting glimpses of boundlessness. A sequence of hard and soft mark-making gives way to abstract curves, bristles, streaks, and runs—providing glimmers of rainfall, arid winds, lush banks, or smokey skies in an otherwise unidentifiable world that is expanding and contracting all at once.

Acutely attuned to a sense of balance, Agboke’s paintings teeter between hot and cold climates, blending various conditions that convey an impossible land or perhaps another planet. Layering levels of land and sky that jettison portals and roads for the viewer to dive in and out from, Agboke offers moments of respite and equilibrium, a place to wander when classification and language fails. Perhaps these spaces give shape to the artist and viewer’s own recollections of displacement, the fragments of places we no longer remember – or that we return to only in dreams.

If the Ground Could Speak attempts to transcribe a conversation with nature without words—or perhaps the experience of listening to one’s surroundings. Walking through the exhibition, Agboke’s paintings emphasize these essential and intrinsic shifts imparted by nature: the welcoming curve of a grassy knoll, the loamy scent of fertile ground, and a cautionary breeze.