Look Here

Travesía Cuatro is delighted to present Look Here, the first solo presentation by Remi Ajani in Mexico, in collaboration with Sid Motion Gallery.

The subject was already there —as part of my inherited history, observing people that I have known directly and indirectly, thinking about time, and how distance can reframe our perspective and link us to the past in new ways. Individual marks, or the characters within themselves, are as important as the images they collectively create. Still, I desperately needed a sense of community and joy to find buoyancy in while making.

 This show is about looking. At paint. At people. At feeling. Hopefully it says something about how I view the world.

– Remi Ajani, March 2024

Remi Ajani’s paintings oscillate between image and picture, color and gesture, and are deeply connected to identity, mythology, and collective experience. 

 Her process starts with found images from her family archives. However, these are not static images but dynamic origins used by the artist to further her exploration of body language, touch and connotations of the figure and used to investigate her interests of how our habits of observation evolve in solitude. Memory becomes an emotional imprint rather than a reduction of a sequence of events.

Conveying a sense of calm and casual intimacy, the pictorial surface turns into a space where collective and personal experiences collide. Inspired by her interest in phenomenology, her research focuses on how to facilitate the audience’s feeling of a shared emotional space.  

This exhibition juxtaposes two rhythms of painting: some works are assembled by a slow, additive process, while in other works the gesture becomes quick and the layers almost disappear. Different temporalities thus lie in each individual image. Moreover, materiality is approached here as a study of time and narrative: a method that leaves room for the viewer’s own associations and impressions, allowing them to fill in the scene that lingers outside the painted image. 

The perspective of the figures in the paintings are placed in the foreground – often oversized and almost too close to the viewer – yet there is breathing space to look at and enjoy the silence. Fluctuating between figuration and abstraction, Look Here delves into the artist’s own experiences of perception and reality, connection and disconnection.  

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Remi Ajani (1984, London) graduated with a distinction from the Slade School of Fine Art, in July 2022 where she was awarded the Almacantar Studio prize for her degree show. Ajani’s first solo exhibition, it’s not what you look at…it’s what you see, opened at Sid Motion Gallery in September 2023. Her recent exhibitions include Image Impressions, FF Projects, Lagos, Nigeria, 2023; Abstract Colour, Marlborough Gallery, London, 2023; Greatest Source of My Longing, Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlín, 2022; Same Same, Sid Motion Gallery, London, 2022; Why Don’t You Dance?, ASC Gallery, Londres, 2022 and (What now?), PM/AM, Londres, 2022. She completed a residency at The Villa Lena Foundation, Tuscany, Italy in 2023.