Golden Light Through Fracture: The Radical Tenderness of Ayo Folayan
Fredrick Favour- Apr 25
- 6 min read
“In every frame, I’m asking: What does it mean to be seen on your terms? And what happens when we start celebrating identity not as something to prove, but something to protect?”
In a contemporary art world often fixated on spectacle, shock, or sterile conceptualism, it is rare, exquisitely rare, to encounter work that speaks in hushed tones yet echoes across cultural time zones with seismic emotional clarity. Ayo Folayan’s art does precisely that.
His artworks, exhibited across the UK, Europe, and Africa, are acts of reclamation. They are scriptures written in light and shadow, where each body, each gaze, is a site of memory, resistance, and renaissance.
Ayo’s emergence within the UK art scene has been tectonic, quietly reshaping the terrain beneath our feet. His name has gained traction through exhibitions at the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists (RBSA) and Boomer Gallery. He was recently recognised as a highly commended artist in the prestigious RBSA Photography Prize 2025, for his works Woman of Colour and Gilded Roots 2.
Anthony Fawcett—yes, the British curator and art critic who once curated for Lennon and Warhol—described his work, particularly the celebrated series Woman of Colour and Gilded Roots, as "phosphorescent mise-en-scènes." And rightfully so. These arts light from within as if illuminated by ancestral memory.
But to truly understand Ayo is to know that he does not photograph people. He enshrines them. A camera found lying in the domestic clutter of his home more than a decade ago moulded this vision within him, one that has travelled from Nigeria to China and now making huge strides in the UK.
The Genesis of a Visual Language
Born in Nigeria and now based in Birmingham, Ayo’s artistic awakening, captured in his recollection of that fateful day at his Nigerian secondary school valedictory service, reads like the first stanza of an epic. A found camera, the impulse to freeze time, and the ensuing joy of portraiture mark the nascent stirrings of what would become a disciplined pursuit of identity and heritage.
Yet, it was in the liminal space of his four-year sojourn in China that Ayo rediscovered his passion, ignited by a friend’s casual snapshot and consummated by the acquisition of his Nikon D7200 camera. Here, the young Ayo learned the indispensable lesson that art need not announce itself with fanfare; sometimes it merely awaits the lightest touch to bloom.
Upon his return to Nigeria after his studies in China, Ayo made the deliberate decision to shed the label of “hobbyist.” In a market still finding its footing in digital photography and contemporary visual art, he carved a niche by focusing on women’s portraiture—a choice both intuitive and revolutionary.
Women, he observed, welcomed the camera’s gaze in ways that spoke to deeper narratives of resilience and grace. This gradually knitted the flow of other themes in his work.
By 2020, projects such as Crowned in Innocence, which challenges how Black boys are seen, too often adultified or criminalised, by showing them instead as vulnerable, sacred, and worthy of tenderness; and Woman of Colour, a series celebrating the beauty and individuality of non-white women, Black women to be precise, in intentional, high-impact artworks laid the groundwork for his subsequent exhibitions and critical acclaim.
An Archive of Soft Power and the Dialogue of Chiaroscuro as a Cultural Strategy
From the first moment one encounters Ayo’s luminous oeuvre, it becomes unmistakably clear that we are in the presence of a visual artist whose vision is at once both deeply rooted and boldly expansive.
Ayo’s mature practice coalesces around a mission articulated in his artist statement: “challenging stereotypes while honouring diasporic legacies.” This ethos, he explains, is personal yet urgent: “I focus on these themes because they form the emotional and cultural foundation of my practice.”
While in the diaspora, he encountered a visual void where images that reflected the fullness of Black identity were scarce, inspiring the project “Diaspora Bloom.” Thus, his work became an “archive of presence,” a counterpoint to erasure.
Ayo’s use of chiaroscuro does not simply nod to Caravaggio or Rembrandt, it complicates them. In his hands, light is not just aesthetic but political. It carves dignity into skin tones the Western canon once shadowed. His work is a refutation of flattening; it insists that Black skin is not to be lit for spectacle, but for revelation. In an art market still caught in the throes of exoticism and trauma-peddling, Ayo’s lighting becomes an act of sovereignty. It is a controlled burn—tempered, precise, reverent.
Ayo’s relocation to Birmingham, UK, marked the next chapter in his odyssey. Exhibiting at the Glasgow Gallery of Photography and the 9th Community Art Exhibition at Circular Artspace in Bristol, he introduced European audiences to his signature chiaroscuro technique.
The art market responded with enthusiasm; works from Gilded Roots engaged viewers with its introspective take on ancestry and identity at Boomer Gallery’s What is Art, 8th Edition, signalling that Ayo’s marriage of technical rigour and cultural symbolism beckons beyond ethnographic curiosity.
Woman of Colour deeply connected with audiences in Africa, the UK, and the diaspora, who felt profoundly seen and touched by its celebration of Black women's strength and beauty, portrayed through rich tones and symbolic portraiture that blends softness with power.
Inheritance and Innovation: Between Two Worlds
Between 2013 and 2023, total sales in the African art market increased by 46%, indicating a steady rise in demand for African art over the decade, with contemporary voices like Ayo’s driving demand. Yet, his work resists the market’s occasional penchant for spectacle, favouring emotional sincerity over flash.
His art, mainly in the Golden Resilience series, draw from the Japanese philosophy of Kintsugi, but with a Yoruba inflection. Where Kintsugi fixes broken ceramics with gold, Ayo gilds the human spirit. His “fractures” are not failures, they are sites of transformation.
One might say that if Kehinde Wiley gives Black figures the grandiosity of oil painting, Ayo gives them the silence of sanctity. He is Wiley’s quieter cousin, no less radical, but whispering instead of roaring.
Using textured fabrics, gold accents, and rich skin tones, he created portraits that speak to the strength and beauty formed through adversity. The golden lines in the series are symbolic markers of survival, memory, and dignity. His Crowned in Innocence series, an ode to Black boyhood, whispers. And in that whisper, it dismantles centuries of caricature. It proposes a radical thesis: that tenderness is a form of armour.
Looking forward, Ayo’s gaze turns to untold stories of intimacy, mainly the bonds between women and children across cultures. “I want to capture moments that feel honest—quiet, vulnerable, and deeply human,” he envisions, signalling a broadening of his thematic palette. His ambition extends beyond galleries to everyday spaces, where art might “live in memory” and “make people feel seen.”
The Scholar’s Eye, The Mystic’s Hand
Technically, Ayo is a master. His workflow from moodboarding to post-production says it all. He builds visual compositions like a poet builds meter; each element is intentional, and each silence between frames as meaningful as the image itself. One sees echoes of Irving Penn in his structure, Lakin Ogunbanwo in his texture, and perhaps even Carrie Mae Weems in his socio-political undertones.
Ayo is not derivative. He is a descendant, yes, but also a departurist. What sets him apart is his refusal to make trauma visible for the sake of consumption. Where so many artists from the Global South are pressured to perform pain, Ayo performs presence. He subverts the demand for “authentic Black suffering” by offering instead authentic Black sovereignty. His work is not about what was taken, but about what remains—rooted, gilded, unbroken.
In an industry that too often rewards volume over vision, Ayo’s restraint is disruptive. He is not prolific; he is precise. And in that precision, he achieves something few artists ever do: timelessness.
The African art market would do well to take note. In a sea of loud gestures and commodified culture, Ayo gives something far rarer: a stillness that speaks, a beauty that bruises, and a legacy already taking root.
If we are to imagine Black futures, let them be imagined through Ayo’s lens—golden, fractured, and gloriously whole.
ABOUT AYO FOLAYAN
As an artist, the true impact of my work is felt in the quiet moments, when a connection sparks, a conversation starts, or a young person sees power and empathy in a Black body and something within them shifts.
It's how people interact, whether they linger, ask questions, or react emotionally.
Occasionally, it is a note from someone halfway around the world saying, 'I felt seen.' It is when the work does its function and serves its purpose
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