Moment before meaning, 2025

Paul Ogunlesi  

Paul Oyetunde Ogunlesi (b. 1994, Nigerian) is a visual artist whose practice vacillates between painting on canvas and drawing on paper.  In creating his paintings, he blends newspaper collages, which he uses as metaphor to outlay hidden narratives behind the situation of his subjects per time, with acrylics, using the wash and tempera finish technique to arrive at his subtledly expressive, textured canvases. Ogunlesi takes a different approach to portraiture in engaging his audience, with the use of truncated, disconcerting compositions. Inspired by life, Yoruba adages, faith, the mundane, the trivial and past experiences, exploring themes such as love, mental health, romance, kindness and hope with tender tones and natural poses, his works echo the singularities of our individual experiences by offering the viewer multi-layered frames to dive into.

In creating his works, Ogunlesi deploys an invasive process to engage his audience, Providing a multiplicity of narratives for his audience to explore, his metaphorical, ambiguous canvases oscillate between a sense of peace and abandonment, Love and hope. Forced into becoming voyeur, the viewer soon becomes the off-screen protagonist of a scene that is left for them  to interpret. Ogunlesi carefully frame his compositions to avoid representing faces, he focuses instead on his characters' feet and legs, creating rich evocative “mediums of shared identities".

Ogunlesi's works has been exhibited with Artefact (Ligerz, Switzerland, 2024) YDC Art Consult (Malta, 2023), HarshCollective Gallery (New York, USA, 2023), Cultivate Gallery (London, 2023), Rele Gallery (2022), Art Pantheon Gallery (2022), Alfaartgallery (NJ, USA, 2021), Artaboutafrica (Johannesburg, South Africa, 2020), @omenkagallery (Lagos, 2019), & Arkane Africa (Casablanca, Morocco, 2019).