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By Okechukwu Uwaezuoke

Every other day, one comes to realize that Nigeria is blessed with so much raw talent. Its art scene has perennially stood as a gallant custodian of cultural memory in real time.

Several maestros including Akinokun Isaiah Abiola’s have continued to treat memory as a palette in his hands, extending the visual archive of contemporary Nigerian society.

Abiola’s paintings have often wandered through Yoruba history, folklore, conflict and survival.

In Arodan (The Messenger), Okunrin Meta(Three Men) and Jagun Jagun (Warrior), he built a loose narrative around the warning,experience and aftermath of war.

His latest work, Family Ties, feels like the fourth chapter of that story. This time, the battle is prevented, although nobody quite escapes its consequences.

The painting follows a king who gives his daughter in marriage to another kingdom
to prevent war. It is an old political language: marriage as diplomacy, family as
treaty, a woman’s future becoming the meeting point between two communities
trying to avoid bloodshed.

Within Abiola’s universe, that decision widens his meditation on conflict. Peace has arrived, but it has come with a price. Abiola works with a grisaille palette here, giving the work a quieter temperament than the darker, more dramatic colours that shaped the earlier paintings. There are no raging warriors or immediate suggestions of violence.

The atmosphere feels subdued, almost
ceremonial, as though everyone inside the scene understands the weight of what is happening.

The daughter occupies the foreground. Her placement gives the painting much of its
emotional tension. While the king’s decision may preserve his people, she is the person who has to physically carry that decision into another life.

The woman becomes the emotional centre of the work, bearing a sacrifice whose benefit belongs largely to everybody around her.That cinematic, dramatic tension gives Family Ties much of its potency as conceptual art.

Abiola has always been interested in inherited responsibility and the way history enters
individual lives. Here, those ideas are contained within something intimate. A political decision becomes a family decision. The survival of a kingdom enters the body and future of one person.

The hero is no longer the warrior who survives the battlefield. Heroism sits inside sacrifice itself. Abiola stretches the idea of resilience away from physical confrontation and towards the difficult compromises people make to keep communities intact.

Seen beside the first three paintings, Family Ties gives the series a fitting new direction. War leaves bodies, grief and displacement in its wake. Avoiding it can demand its own difficult bargains. Abiola’s painting understands that peace can be beautiful, necessary and deeply expensive; sometimes peace also leaves a
wound.