Johnson Eziefula - From Time to A Time

Johnson Eziefula’s debut solo exhibition explores the purgative power of loss. This exhibition presents a new series of recent paintings dedicated to the artist’s late brother who passed away in March 2022. This presentation emerges from a new series of naturalistic paintings entitled ‘How Did We Get Here?’ In which Eziefula pays homage to the memories of familial bonds painfully ripped away. The scenes depict contrasting episodes from different phases of the artist’s life, and surreptitiously his brother’s too having grown up together in a tightly knit family in Lagos. In some of the scenes, his beloved brother is ‘present’, in that he was vigorous, energized and capable of sharing in the conveyed common consciousness. In others, his brother is absent, having already departed to fortify the realm of the ancestors. There is an essence and joyous presence in virtually every piece that masks the deeper heartache that propelled and fuelled the creation of works in this series. Eziefula is a notoriously patient and deliberate painter but for this series, grief catalyzes and accelerates the creative process, allowing a prolificacy that he never knew was imminent.