An introduction to Stanley Dudu’s recent pastel art by Dapo Adeniyi.

There is a sense in which that notion that art actually mirrors life can never be dismissed as as a cliche. For art continues to reveal us to us. Sometimes, as in this, painters bring to light the lives that we live daily but take for granted.

Dudu produces very illustrative narratives of living in the context of its contradictions. With lucid and, shall we say, lurid and incandescent drawings he explores the fullest extent of the pastel medium in its assortment of applications. The pictures are soft and affective, transcending picture-perfect. Stanley speaks in clear language even while his themes surprise because they put before us aspects of our lives we often miss. He captures moments when we are at the intersection of pleasures and pain and hope and despair. Take for example the simple desires that we crave and which after they are achieved, place anxieties upon our shoulders.

This is why we have scenes from painting to painting of the mother that prays, surrounded by her infant children – the peak achievement of womanhood in Africa and other cultural surroundings, the young woman that clutches the picture of her husband who is long despatched to distances due to war or work, a bride that braces herself for the ultimate wedding ceremony in spite of the uncertainties of married life, the expectant mother who is happy having conceived but has to face the dangers of labour and birth, the flamboyant celebrant and her friends who is inflicted with hollowness and feelings that are less than bright, a guitarist singing and twanging away about love even though it is often elusive, or among others the damsel who is poring over books in search of ways of entrapping affection!

The majority of the people in the world of these paintings represent the rest of us. Their lives are indicative of ours. They are caught in the drudgery of everyday living. They remind that the beauty of life is in the ordinariness of it: the little pleasures in pain, the discomforts of pleasures, the illusions of flamboyance, the illusions of hope.

Stanley Dudu the ultimate pastelist presents us with a beautiful world. Our world.

Dapo Adeniyi is the publisher of Position, International Arts Review.