Untitled 2017

Laolu Senbanjo made this untitled painting, we don't know when, in what looks like acrylic on canvas. I love how the whole thing is covered in marks! It’s so exuberant, with this orange background and the figure covered in black and white patterns. The figure is squatting, arm up in the air, but the posture feels more like the start of a dance than a static pose. You can see this in the marks on the figure’s body, the way they seem to swell and shrink to echo the underlying form. Check out the triangles on the thighs, packed together so tightly that they feel almost like they're breathing! And there are faces dotted around the background like watchful spirits, like the marks themselves are looking back at you. It reminds me of some of the paintings of another great mark maker, Jean-Michel Basquiat; both artists create entire worlds out of simple lines, building layers of meaning and feeling. It's all about the process of painting, building a language of marks that is both personal and universal.