S. Aka and his Sakara Group: ArtXLagos 2025

S. Aka and his Sakara Group is a continuation of Adewale Kolawole John’s study of the intersections between art and Nigeria’s cultural history. Through twenty works in oil and acrylic on paper, John revisits the sonic and social world of Sakara music, a Yoruba tradition whose insistent drums and lilting vocals once animated the night air.

 

Each figure in John’s series appears absorbed in rhythm: musicians and band patrons, rendered with a quiet, lyrical intensity. His brushwork oscillates between gesture and silence, mirroring the call-and-response of performance itself. His use of colour and intricate ankara, aso oke, and damask designs display a talent that comes naturally to the artist.

 

The Yoruba tribal mark is a common thread in this series, a tribute to the scarification on his grandfather’s face.

 

At the centre of the booth stands Akinola Lasekan’s Portrait of Femi, a historical anchor and not for sale. Its inclusion places John’s work within a lineage of Nigerian image-making, linking the tonal discipline of early modernist portraiture to the immediacy of contemporary figuration.

 

In pairing John’s new paintings with Lasekan’s modernist image, the booth becomes a meditation on cross-generational continuity, cultural memory, and the evolving language of the Nigerian portrait.

 

John’s work draws you in with quiet intensity. Each face feels familiar yet elusive, a reminder that the Nigerian portrait tradition has always been as much about the unseen spirit as the visible likeness.