Remember What You Are: Kejii’s The Four Element Series

Released on 6 October 2025, The Four Element Series marks a contemplative body of work by Nigerian artist Balikis Badru, professionally known as Kejii. Comprising four oil-on-canvas paintings, Fire, Earth, Air, and Water, the series explores humanity’s enduring relationship with the natural world, positioning the elements not as forces external to us, but as intrinsic aspects of our being.

Drawing inspiration from elemental storytelling traditions, including Avatar: The Last Airbender, Kejii transforms cultural reference points into a deeply personal visual language. Each painting features a faceless female silhouette dissolving into its respective element. The absence of facial features is deliberate. Identity is left open, allowing viewers to recognise themselves within the forms. These figures are not portraits but conduits, bodies that burn, root, drift, and flow, mirroring the elements they embody.

In Fire, Kejii challenges conventional associations of destruction and chaos. Rendered in deep reds, oranges, and shadowed blacks, the figure appears forged rather than consumed. Flames radiate from within, suggesting fire as passion, ambition, and transformative energy. It is portrayed as a vital inner force, intense yet sustaining, just as capable of creation as destruction.

Earth introduces a sense of weight and stillness. Warm browns, ochres, and muted greens evoke soil and raw matter, while the figure feels almost sculptural, as though carved from the land itself. This work speaks to endurance and quiet strength, presenting earth as a stabilising presence, ancient, patient, and unwavering.

In contrast, Air is the most ethereal of the series. Swirling blues accented with touches of gold create a sense of movement and impermanence. The figure dissolves at its edges, occupying space lightly rather than asserting form. Here, air represents breath, freedom, and the unseen forces that shape direction and spirit.

The series concludes with Water, a meditation on adaptability and emotional depth. Cool blues and soft whites envelop the figure in continuous motion, blurring the boundary between body and environment. Water is presented as fluid and resilient, embracing change without loss of essence.

Across the series, the recurring feminine form functions as a subtle homage to Mother Nature, reinforcing themes of creation, nurturing, and continuity. What distinguishes The Four Element Series is not just its technical precision but its emotional intelligence. By stripping away preconceptions and individual identity, Kejii invites a collective reflection, one that resists domination over nature and instead encourages reconnection.

Quiet yet insistent, The Four Element Series asks viewers to pause and remember a fundamental truth. We are not separate from the elements we observe, we are made of them.