Paul Majek-Oduyoye

My paintings are about family and shadow figures in blue spaces, the work evokes dream-like emotions of peace and reminiscence. I use the subject matter of family archives intertwined with recollections of my immediate environment. It’s important that my paintings work with the autonomy of transparency and softness, this is translated through the wood - its grain, charcoal, acrylic and oil paints. An amalgamation of found images, archives, and imagined spaces. I’m questioning concealment and its relation to honesty, intimacy, and truth. The concealing, layering, and blurring – the opacity of blues and browns, somehow becomes freedom and liberation.  I want to remain in the defined unknown, this abstraction is funnelled through the figuration in my work. The process of ruminations and divinations, time travelling through the fluidity of fiction and history. Where spirits commune.

“Paul Majek takes his own blue-hued lucid dreaming as a point of departure to probe the materiality of liminal spaces in his practice. As his painting title Blues behind closed eyes (2021) alludes, he takes interest in what may be “bubbling beneath the surface” of his consciousness. Painting in oil, acrylic and charcoal on wood panels or canvas, Paul recreates the defined terrain of the subliminal. He recontextualizes woodgrain as a liquid form and imprints Nigerian symbols to support a sense of transparency in his figures and ethereality of imagined spaces. His gentle yet ghostly visual language renders his work “soft and easy to enter”, allowing his paintings to serve as permeable passageways between dreams, death and rebirth. In this selection of work, he references archival family photos of people and spaces only partially known to him. He approaches the archive as its own autonomous language in order to traverse the perforated landscapes of memory, love, generational dialogue, and spirituality.”
 

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