Look Here. Remi Ajani. Condo CDMX 2024

The gallery is delighted to announce our participation in Condo Mexico City 2024, with the solo exhibition ‘Look Here’ by Remi Ajani, generously hosted by Travesía Cuatro.

Condo CDMX 2024 is a collaborative exhibition by 40 international galleries across 20 spaces in Mexico City.

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. 

Artist Biography

Remi Ajani (b. 1984, London) graduated with a distinction from the Slade School of Fine Art, in July 2022 where she was awarded the Almacantar Studio award 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, Berlin, 2022; ‘Same Same’, Sid Motion Gallery, London, 2022; ‘Why Don’t You Dance?’, ASC Gallery, London, 2022 and ‘(What now?)’, PM/AM, London, 2022. She completed a residency at The Villa Lena Foundation, Tuscany, Italy in 2023.