Debayo (b. 1995) grew up in Lagos, Nigeria and moved to London in 2012 for a master’s degree. Raised in Africa’s modern heartbeat, Lagos; the energy of this quick and quirky urban world seeps into his work.
“ I’m a colourist, and a portrait artist - my work is informal, colourful and people-focused. I like using bold lines and large areas of colour to push and pull the viewer to brood in the moment of the work. I am a painter very much interested in the look of a painting. But behind the big colours and wild brown lines, there’s a human person in the piece that I hope viewers can feel and relate to. Colour and shape is my focus, people and modernity are my scaffolding.
Most of my portraits feature a single person, usually African, centre-stage, with the background, colour combos and textures all informing my subject’s mind state. In this way, one by one I explore the human condition, from my corner of existence. “
“ My paintings tend to focus on modern settings and situations, often using phones, cities, and other symbols of modernity to ground a piece and its subject in this time - the present. Probably this is because I’ve spent all my life in the megacities of Lagos, Nigeria, and now London. Nowhere is more focused on the present than in cities.“
“ Sadly necessary disclaimer; I’m making an effort to be true to myself, and to struggle against the gravitational force of people’s expectations of a black man’s artwork, and to show my art that isn’t pinholed into only talking about ‘blackness’.
However my subjects are always black people. This is definitely a conscious choice I’ve made before every portrait painting. I grew up in Lagos, Nigeria, surrounded by a billion brown faces. The subjects in my portraits all have a piece of me and my life in them. I’ve been black my whole life, so have most of my family and friends, it’s my space and my viewpoint in this world. “