Adebayo Jolaoso’s Poetic Exploration of Stillness

There is a kind of artistic growth that doesn’t make noise. It builds slowly and sheds things. It shows up, in the end, as a quietness that catches you off guard. There is also a specific kind of courage in making work that doesn’t try to arrest or seize you. Somewhere between those two ideas is where Adebayo Jolaoso stands with A Language of Motion, his latest exhibition held at Miliki Lagos in March, and to understand how he got here, you have to look at where he started.

Cue in Nomadic Art Gallery, Victoria Island,  where Jolaoso presented  As We Are & A Little Bit More, his first exhibition, which placed him inside Lagos’ fashion world, but not in the way that world usually works. As an artist, he wasn’t interested in finished looks or spectacle. He moved toward the stillness of preparation backstage, toward people in the middle of becoming something. The work carried a documentary instinct shaped by a poetic eye, rooted in a specific city and a specific kind of looking. That rootedness gave it a weight that fashion-adjacent work rarely earns.

as we are & a little bit more, Nomadic Gallery, 2025

But it didn’t stop there. 

A Little Bit More, presented alongside it, introduced his collaboration with his partner Adeibukun Adeniyi, felt like a necessary disruption. Her painted intervention entered directly onto the photographic surface, refusing to let the images settle into anything final. Openly playful, deliberately unfinished, and willing to fall apart at the edges. That willingness is important because it didn’t come from nowhere. The overpaintings  were inspired by Jolaoso’s nephews and nieces, by the way children move through creativity without seeking permission or worrying about the doneness or correctness of a thing. There’s something in the way a child draws that is unrestrained, not self-conscious, a little chaotic, and  completely present, that found its way into the collection and quietly changed what it could be. You can’t arrive at stillness without first sitting with what it feels like to leave things open.

A Language of Motion, Miliki, 2026

Back at Miliki. Back to the room where nothing is trying to impress anyone. Walking into A Language of Motion, the first thing that registers isn’t any single image. It’s the atmosphere, the absence of urgency, the fact that nothing is competing for your attention. In a moment where photographs are increasingly engineered to stop thumbs mid-scroll, to land hard and fast and move on, Jolaoso has created art that does the opposite. His work waits. It lets you come to it. And if you slow down enough to actually look, something quietly shifts.

That quality is not accidental. It comes from years spent thinking seriously about what an artist chooses to control.

Spontaneity sits at the heart of Jolaoso’s practice, but not in the way the word is typically used. This isn’t luck. It’s discipline—the discipline of showing up, staying present, and resisting the urge to tidy a moment into something it isn’t. He isn’t arranging. He isn’t performing. He’s watching. And when something unscripted surfaces, a gesture, a body mid-turn, a fleeting moment of unguarded feeling, he’s there for it. Not just to capture it, but to receive it.

That difference is palpable when you stand in front of the photographs. They don’t look taken. They look found.

Movement for Jolaoso isn’t a problem to solve. It isn’t something to freeze into a clean statement or pin down before it escapes. It’s something to stay inside of, to follow, to sit with, to let remain unresolved. A hand caught mid-gesture doesn’t land anywhere final. A body turning away doesn’t fully disappear. The images live in the in-between, in the moment just before things settle, and he refuses to push them past that point. It takes patience to work that way. It also takes humility, an acceptance that the image was never entirely yours to begin with.

That same philosophy carries into his collaboration with Adeniyi, though here it appears with restraint. There is only one photograph in the exhibition where she paints directly onto the print. 

What she adds is a butterfly, easy to miss at first because of where it’s placed, its painted strokes sitting quietly against the photographic surface until something draws your eye to it. But once you see it, it reframes everything else in the room. Jolaoso has spoken about why he chose it in simple terms, and the reason goes back further than the work itself. As a child, growing up around a home full of flowers, he chased butterflies as a pastime in  the kind of garden that made that sort of thing possible. So he knows their movement intimately. Butterflies don’t move in straight lines. Their flight is unpredictable, drifting, doubling back, hovering, redirecting without warning. And yet nothing about them feels clumsy. Nothing reads as confusion. They move the way they move, and it looks completely right.

That tension between unpredictability and grace, between a path that resists logic and a movement that still feels whole, mirrors what he is reaching for in the photographs themselves. The butterfly doesn’t explain the work. It reflects it. It makes visible, in a single gesture, something that runs quietly through the entire exhibition. It would have been easy to push that intervention further, to let it spread across multiple works and become a defining feature of the show. The decision to hold it to one image becomes part of the same language: knowing when not to add more, trusting what is already there.

What makes A Language of Motion difficult to summarise is that it doesn’t hand you anything fixed. There is no single image that declares itself as the centre. No moment that closes the meaning of the work. The exhibition resists that kind of clarity. It asks you to stay longer than you planned, to notice what wasn’t visible at first, to accept that what you feel might not fully translate into words.

That is either a limitation or an achievement, depending on what you believe photography should do.

Jolaoso seems clear on where he stands. He isn’t making work for the quick look. He isn’t interested in images that hit immediately and disappear just as fast. He is after something slower, something that settles over time, that returns to you later, unannounced.

Honesty, here, is not about rawness. It is about refusal. Refusal to clean up a moment, to remove its uncertainty, to resolve what does not naturally resolve. The photographs keep their edges. And in those edges, something more truthful remains.

By the time you leave, nothing has been explained. No argument has been neatly closed. What you carry with you is quieter, a feeling, perhaps, or a question you didn’t arrive with. A sense that movement can be held without being stopped. That something unpredictable can still be exactly right.

A Language of Motion is an exhibition built on trust. It trusts time. It trusts attention. And it trusts the viewer enough to leave space for them.

In a room full of photographs, that trust becomes the most lasting thing in it.