Dr Minna Moore Ede finds a confluence of inspiration, including early Italian Renaissance art and influences from West African culture, in the tempera paintings created by Richard Ayodeji Ikhide for his exhibition Incroci del Passato (Crossroads of the Past) at Victoria Miro Venice in 2025.
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Working for the first time with egg tempera, London-based Nigerian artist, Richard Ayodeji Ikhide, presents a new body of work inspired by his recent residency with Victoria Miro in Venice. Emulating the early Italian Renaissance painters who worked in fast drying tempera, Ikhide learnt to mix his own paints, blending egg yolk with pigment, delighting in the luminosity of the painted surface and its durability.The result is a group of ten paintings whose fluid, interlocking forms of brilliant colour reveal Ikhide’s discovery of early Italian Renaissance iconography, which he combines with borrowings from Nigeria’s Edo religion, West African art and Japanese Manga.
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Richard Ayodeji Ikhide, Patri, 2025 -
Painted in response to images of Saint Jerome in the wilderness that he saw in Venice, Patri is an interpretation of the penitent saint’s story. In Ikhide’s painting, the dreadlocked protagonist is shown meditating outside a rocky cave holding a painter’s mahlstick (instead of a rock) with which he blends pigments in a bowl. Behind him, West African ancestor sculptures appear, referencing the Edo religion in which an invisible world of supernatural beings act as intercessors with the human world.Ikhide reworks art historical iconography, painting in Black bodies once excluded from the canon; they are not faithful representations of individuals but have a conceptual underpinning. Ikhide paints these figures by combining a multitude of different, opaque shades of brown (never white) to model the form, according them the weight of tradition that they partially embrace and partially refute.
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Richard Ayodeji Ikhide, Matri, 2025
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In Ikhide’s work, the masculine (Jungian) archetype is often balanced by a female counterpart and in Matri he depicts a penitent saint, whose black hair falls Mary Magdalene-like down her back, her arms raised in prayer to a vivid, red sun. The gesture is echoed by the effigy on her left, but the true meaning of the work lies in the ancient dolmen or portal tomb behind the figures – an allusion to the womb and to woman as giver of life.
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Richard Ayodeji Ikhide, Youths, 2025
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This intriguing blend of Renaissance religious iconography with the artistic and religious traditions (both indigenous and Christian) of Ikhide's Nigerian homeland is a running theme throughout his exhibition. A regular visitor to the National Gallery in London, the artist has long been fascinated by the paintings of the Venetian born, fifteenth-century painter Carlo Crivelli (about 1430–1495). Known for his strong, linear, decorative style and gem-like colours (he also worked in tempera), Crivelli’s portrayals of the Holy Family struck a chord with Ikhide, who has recently had a child himself. In his painting, Youths, the Christian story is reimagined and Ikhide’s Matri and Patri figures are presided over by an egungun – an ancestor spirit masquerading as a crocodile. A cultural tradition much practised by the Yoruba of West Africa, it is believed that the presence of these spirits at important ceremonial occasions confers blessings and protection.
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Richard Ayodeji Ikhide, Communion, 2025
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Artefacts, effigies and vessels all carry rich symbolic and ritualistic value for Ikhide. The figures in his paintings hold them, carry them on their backs and pray before them. In this too, he takes inspiration from Crivelli who incorporates an abundance of meticulously depicted symbols of good and evil into his work. Indeed, the Italian was famous for his visual tricks, for example duping the viewer into attempting to brush away a fly that was in fact painted. For Crivelli, apples and flies symbolise sin, while cucumbers and goldfinches reference redemption and the soul.The objects, charms and artefacts that are shown with Ikhide’s protagonists are pieces of Nok terracotta from South-Western Nigeria or ancient African and Meso-American sculptures that the artist discovered in the British Museum. They function as talismans, accompanying the characters on their journey, helping them to make sense of it, in much the same way that Crivelli’s objects were intended to be read by the viewer over five hundred years ago.
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Richard Ayodeji Ikhide, Blessing, 2025
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Ikhide’s Blessing is a direct homage to Crivelli’s painting of the same subject from 1482, Christ Blessing, albeit with a more rebellious spirit.The celestial orb that Christ holds in his left hand, symbol of his role as Saviour of the world, has been replaced by a stone which is held out as an offering. The absolute centrality of Crivelli’s work appealed to Ikhide and in his painting the wide eyes of the shamanic figure stare directly out at us, mirrored by the tribal mask below. Like Crivelli’s Christ, his right hand is raised in a gesture of blessing, a universally understood spiritual act. Four of Ikhide’s characteristic circles in blue accentuate the triangular form, an ancient symbol of the Godhead.By reclaiming elements of early Italian painting, Ikhide draws authority from the historical tradition. But he also expands upon it. Infusing his own unique mythology, Ikhide recodes its values and in so doing makes it his own.Dr Minna Moore EdeText © Dr Minna Moore Ede
All works © Richard Ayodeji Ikhide -
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