Aaron Kudi’s paintings take faith as a mythology of the human condition. Their durable concern is human extremity: what it is to endure, and what it is to go on holding when nothing yet confirms the holding. None of it is illustrated; it is carried as a condition the surface has to bear.
The practice grows from a single root: that to tend a thing and to keep it are one act, and that burial and waiting belong inside it. Painting, for Kudi, is that act made physical.
Each work is made on the floor, on large cotton duck, in liquid metal, industrial enamel and ink. The first act is surrender. Enamel separates and skins as liquid metal moves through it and fractures it. Gravity decides where everything settles. The second act is excavation. Kudi draws the image out of what the material has already done rather than laying one over it, in a long and disciplined edit. What remains is what proved necessary.
The work stands between two traditions. From Nigerian Natural Synthesis, the Zaria Art Society and Uche Okeke, it takes the conviction that a modern language can be built from the ground one comes from. From the New York School it takes the scale and seriousness of the poured field. Kudi is fluent in both and resident in neither.
He was raised between the empirical world of a scientific father and the Pentecostal rhythm of a Hausa mother, and between Bauchi and England, and he came to painting as the language that did not ask him to choose. In the work the analytical and the devotional are not opposing modes but the same attention conducted at different depths. That attention is practised outside the studio too, in churches and on pilgrimage, so that the faith in the paintings is researched from inside rather than borrowed as a motif.
The work moves across three supports as one language. The paintings on canvas are its body. Paper holds its relics, the intimate register where the stain sinks into the sheet, and translucent tarpaulin carries the shroud, where the transfer becomes the veil.
The paintings refuse the demand, placed so often on artists of the African diaspora, to explain themselves through legible narrative or recognisable trauma. They are offered in full and they do not translate themselves.