Agbowo’s Editor in Chief, Adedayo Agarau goes in conversation with Ifoghale Wilson.
I spent some time speaking with Ifoghale, who reflects on painting as a way to live beyond narrow definitions of “work.” He traces how movement, late-night shifts, and a stubborn joy shape his practice and talks about transit, rivalry reframed as kinship, and how looking up at the sky taught him to hold politics and tenderness in the same frame. Ifoghale is one artist who carefully paints the abstraction of stress and fun in Lagos and elsewhere, blurring the social definition of class in a single stroke.
Adedayo: I keep circling back to the twin works that share the title “Nowhere to arrive.” In one, a lone rider drifts across an empty train compartment, the blue of her dress dissolving into the window’s bleached glare; in the other, that same phrase hovers over a windswept field where cloud-shapes advance like restless migrants. Nigeria’s highways are full of people chasing futures elsewhere, yet your canvases linger in the limbo between departure and destination. How did your own experiences of movement—whether the daily Lagos commute or the more abstract journey away from dogma you describe in your bio—seed this meditation on perpetual transit, and what political weight do you hope viewers feel when they realize the search for arrival may be unending?
IFOGHALE: I think since I’ve been young, I’ve been very pre-occupied with this weight of “who am I going to become?” It didn’t really help that I wasn’t half-bad at many things. Anyway, as I grew up and life got more serious into secondary school and Uni, I grew towards a more expected version of myself. I thought, okay, here’s the modern world. I’m going to become the person who gets a job, gets paid and maybe that’s it, maybe there’s something there for me. But I distinctly remember going to one of my old jobs in the car, absolutely unsatisfied with my life and yearning for more. I remember wondering if the other people at my office felt the same way. I would be sat at my desk and look around feeling so off, wondering if other people felt just as wrong as I did. I changed jobs a lot over the past 5 years, usually because one paid more than the other or it sounded more prestigious, my parents would be prouder this way. And, in the midst of changing jobs and becoming someone else over and over again, I realized that the problem wasn’t that I was confused or broken in some way. The problem was I took issue with modern life and its definition of work. The one where you pick a high-paying job and stick with it for a long enough time to retire into some money, then you start to focus on your life. I decided at some point last year that I didn’t want or like that. I decided that, for myself, it was important to follow my curiosities and allow my work and my life to evolve naturally around those. I have this one life and I think I want it to be one where I’m happy and satisfied with myself, no matter what the modern world might say. My goal isn’t to become somebody. My goal is to turn my hands, time and attention towards what I feel is vital to me. I think that most surely, it’s art. But I’m not thinking about art as painting, sculpture or any one thing. Like I said, I’m decent at a few things and I want to stay very curious. I want to stay open and I don’t want to worry about becoming. I want to worry about building a body of work that I’ll be proud of 50 years from now, and I trust that life and history will frame who I am appropriately based on my body of work.
When people look at Nowhere to arrive, I want them to feel lighter as they give themselves permission to be something other than what they imagined for themselves when they were 10 years old. Beyond the influence of what’s popular, and beyond the allure of stability in the era of modern work, I wish people would be more comfortable with containing multitudes. It’s the original human experience. Life hasn’t always been this endless cycle of office jobs and compartmentalization — work life, personal life, etc. I want them to remember that the point of being human is to constantly change. It’s the natural way of being, everything changes and shifts.
Adedayo: “We’re on the same side here” tilts the tennis court until we stare straight down at two athletes locked in rally; their shadows meet first, long before the ball flashes star-bright at mid-court. Tennis arrived in West Africa with the British colonial class, yet you repurpose the game’s language of opposition—serve, volley, fault—into a visual essay on collaboration. From that vertiginous viewpoint, the net becomes less a dividing line than a thread binding player to player. Could you speak to how you choreograph bodies, shadows, and space to rethink rivalry as kinship, and whether this reimagining gestures toward any contemporary social conflicts you feel must be reframed in a similar fashion?
IFOGHALE: “We’re on the same side here” was me basically pushing myself to express joy. That painting took me forever to complete which I think is funny because someone else said I finished it rather quickly. But anyway, the reason I feel it took so long is because I didn’t spend a lot of time with it. I had little pockets of moments where I would settle down with it and just rush through it. I didn’t make too many changes, it basically ended up exactly how I pictured it. During those weeks, I was doing a lot of late night sessions at work; which I wasn’t enjoying. I felt I spent much of my time dreading the hours. So I made sure that whenever I could find some tiny slot to finally paint, I noticed how much I loved it. I watched this lovely show The Good Place while I was painting this piece, it was so funny and heartfelt loool. I really enjoyed painting this, though I didn’t like when I had to leave it. There was this tension between my work self and my painting self. I didn’t like that.
Adedayo: Your palette leans on bruised blues and ember-toned yellows, a spectrum that feels both intimate and ecological. The ochre seat backs in the train scene echo the earth tones of the marshy path in the landscape, while the court in “We’re on the same side here” glints like sunlit lagoon water. Born in 1999, you came of age reading headlines about oil spills in the Delta and rising sea levels along the Gulf of Guinea—events that dye whole geographies overnight. When you lift pigment to the canvas, do those environmental realities govern your chromatic choices, and how consciously are you courting a viewer’s ecological memory as part of the emotional resonance of each scene?
IFOGHALE: I think you’re right in that it’s an ecological memory. I used to look up at the sky a lot as a child, it’s so peaceful and open. Honestly I just want people to look up. I’ve been noticing the sky more and more lately and it feels endless. I fell in love with that idea and I think about it all the time: things feel possible. The sky gives me that feeling of endlessness that I need to just create and generally exist. Some people might tell you otherwise but I’m actually ridiculously optimistic, I always insist that things are going to be fine. As a result I fell in love with the blues. It also feels good to recognize blue as a warm color — it’s nice to stumble into new ideas which now that I think about it is a very old idea.
Adedayo: You trained in electrical and electronics engineering before turning, self-taught, to painting. I sense that background in the way your compositions conduct light: the train window acts like a raw cathode flooding the carriage; the tennis ball erupts with the crisp flare of a filament; the cumulus clouds stack like capacitors storing latent charge above the field. How does thinking in terms of circuits, voltage, or systems analysis infiltrate your brushwork, and do you find that scientific mindset sharpening or complicating the more intuitive, poetic urges that drive your political commentary on canvas?
IFOGHALE: I don’t think about my training in engineering when I paint at all. Though, I think one way I stay connected to that is the idea of light. I’m obsessed with light and its effects, it’s something I’m deeply interested in playing around with. So I think my scientific mindset allows me to stay open in how I think about my art and what I create. My brushwork is probably as a result of me choosing to follow instincts when I paint. It’s about the only time I do. Science asks me to be precise and measured, art allows me to swing. I prefer to swing on most day. I should say though, I think about what kind of art I could make with just pure light. I imagine it’ll take me back to my engineering days, looking forward to that.
Adedayo: Poetry, music, and light sit at the center of your stated influences, yet the paintings also carry a quiet rage—an insistence on healing without ever masking the wound. When you title a work “Nowhere to arrive,” you enlist language as both map and riddle; when you paint a game meant to divide and insist we’re allies, you turn slogan into strategy. Which poets or songwriters teach you most about holding contradiction—about letting tenderness and confrontation share the same stanza—and how do you translate that lesson into the layered brushstrokes, half-erased marks, and luminous voids that keep your political questions vibrating long after the eye leaves the surface?
IFOGHALE: All my paintings are inspired by music and poetry. Nothing makes me imagine things as vividly as music and poems. That’s why I like to put up my work on my Instagram; I can select the exact song that the painting is most referencing in terms of feeling. I love presenting my work alongside the song, it feels the most complete representation of what I’m trying to say.
I was inspired by Ichiko Aoba’s “Sagu Palm’s Song” while painting and experiencing “We’re all on the same side here”. I liked that it felt like water, and I’m sure that idea seeped into the brushwork for the painting.
“Nowhere to arrive” is a direct homage to a poem called “Rootless” by Jenny Xie, one of my favourite writers ever. Her poem is about this vast internal world where time feels slow and purposeful, and that feeling was recognizable to me.
I like when art gives me a very strong opinion that is at odds with what’s popular. These days, it’s all about productivity and output and speed. You have to outwork the next person or go broke. But what if this wasn’t necessarily true? Competition versus collaboration. Output versus impact. There’s a side that feels tender and good, and then there’s what the world is.
Ifoghale Wilson
Ifoghale Eguwe (b. 1999) is a self-taught multidisciplinary visual artist and designer whose creative practice strives to tell stories that evoke strong emotions. Inspired by poetry, music and light, he channels his ideas around themes like modern society, introspection and human connections into his work. These themes push him to discover his surroundings in detail, reflecting a personal journey to learn the world for what it is. In this way, his work travels and connects with folks who aren’t satisfied with the way things are.