1-54 London 2025 - Lines of Spirit: Afeez Onakoya . Paul Majek . Simon Ojeaga
For its 2025 presentation at 1-54 London, O’DA Art Gallery brings together the practices of Simon Ojeaga, Paul Majek, and Afeez Onakoya under the curatorial frame Lines of Spirit. The presentation reflects the gallery’s ongoing commitment to championing experimental figuration and abstraction emerging from Africa, situating artists who are expanding visual languages while remaining deeply connected to questions of identity, memory, and community.
At the heart of this presentation is the idea that line and form are not only compositional tools but vessels of spirit — carriers of memory, rhythm, and transcendence. Each of the three artists explores this proposition from a distinct vantage point, resulting in a conversation that is at once intergenerational, conceptual, and intensely personal.
Simon Ojeaga pioneers a fractals technique that merges mathematics, sound, and image into a new visual vocabulary. His works pulse with layered repetition, generating figurative and atmospheric worlds that echo the logics of rhythm, music, and cosmology. Through this method, Ojeaga positions painting as both structure and improvisation — a site where the unseen patterns of existence find visual form.
Paul Majek approaches painting as a terrain of memory. His textured, gestural compositions hover between abstraction and figuration, suggesting landscapes of the psyche as much as cultural narratives. Majek’s surfaces are charged with references to resilience, spirituality, and the collective imagination, embodying the ways in which memory can be both fractured and generative.
Afeez Onakoya situates his luminous figures within spaces that oscillate between the urban and the spiritual. His portraits are meditations on masculinity, belonging, and contemporary Black life, rendered with sensitivity to both the vulnerability and strength of his subjects. In their glowing presence, we see figuration as a site of renewal — a way of envisioning community and continuity in rapidly shifting worlds.
Together, these practices trace what we call lines of spirit — pathways that connect form to feeling, rhythm to memory, and gesture to transcendence. This presentation underscores O’DA Art’s curatorial vision: to bring forward African voices who expand contemporary art discourse through works that are not only formally rigorous but also profoundly engaged with the lived, the remembered, and the imagined.
