In a world that is increasingly filled with visual noise on the airwaves and the internet, a world in which color and excess seem to have taken up so much space that there is no room for subtext, Makinde Ifeoluwa’s photography is a breath of fresh air because of its insistence on subtext. The work is a distillation of the world into its essence: light, texture, form, and meaning. In his recent body of work, the Nigerian photographer/filmmaker invites the viewer into intimate contact with the mundane world and encourages a reevaluation of what remains, what decays, and what remains unseen.
In Till Death Do Us Part, there are two palm trees that rise up against a white sky that is almost a void. The composition is stripped to the bone: there is no color, there is no horizon, only the meeting of lines and light. From a low vantage point, the two palm trees rise up like sentinels, each unique but inseparable from the other. The viewer is given a sense of scale that is small but intimate, as if they are included in the same space of air that the two trees share. There is a sense of architecture to the composition: the two trees rise up like columns, the leaves of the tree reaching up to the ornate ceiling of some forgotten temple. But there is a sense of warmth to the precision of the image. The slight asymmetry of the two trees, the way each of the tree tops leans slightly in toward the other, is a commentary on perfection but intimacy. The image is a commentary on the idea of companionship, the way that the bond between two people can last even when they are rooted apart. The restraint of the image turns what could have been a commentary on the symmetrical into a commentary on love. The two trees, reaching up toward the same light, serve as a commentary on the human heart.
While Till Death Do Us Part is a prayer, Ifeoluwa’s second photograph, Apocalypse, is its answer. The image is a landscape of exhaustion, with weeds half-grown and drying out before half-built constructions. In the background, a twilight sky glows with an orange hue, its light hidden behind a cloud. The effect is disquieting. The scene could be a construction site or a ruin. The cloud could also be a mushroom, a metaphor for explosion. The intention is clear.
With Apocalypse, Ifeoluwa has moved from realism to metaphor. The title has given a new dimension to the image, that of revelation or uncovering, from the Greek word apokálypsis. In this image, destruction is not spectacle; rather, it is inevitability. The half-built constructions and exhausted flora are a reminder of a civilization that has outlived its faith in permanence. A barren tree, stretching towards light, is a witness and participant in this fading world.
The last piece, Negro Element, is a work that turns inward. It is a close-up so close that it is almost abstract, a field of fine lines and ridges, light playing across its surface. There is nothing to see, no subject matter, and no identifiable object. Just texture, the texture of the surface of a black person’s skin.
In this work, Ifeoluwa has paid homage and reclaimed, all at once. He has deliberated on Blackness, not as a color but as a substance. The work challenges us to look beyond color and to see texture, tenacity, and complexity as the real essence of Blackness. By abstracting the body, he has made it infinite. The surface, so easily overlooked, has become sacred.
These images together constitute a quiet trilogy, a trilogy about endurance, about love, about civilization, and about identity. The genius of Ifeoluwa’s art is that it finds meaning in the subtext, making the ordinary become the enduring. This art doesn’t seek attention; it quietly earns it.