A Thistle Throb

Thistle Throb by British painter Jadé Fadojutimi is a monumental and dazzling cornucopia of purple hues that recalls the deployment of this elusive color by Claude Monet, Gustav Klimt, and Helen Frankenthaler, something recently celebrated by Artforum in declaring that Fadojutimi “was giving Monet waterlilies” with her use of swirling, floral forms (K. Sutton, “Your Place or Mine? Kate Sutton around Amsterdam and London Art Weekends,” Artforum, June 8, 2023). Nearly six feet square, A Thistle Throb—a title that evokes movement, desire, and nature, is the artist’s vital contribution to the pantheon of abstraction. More than that, she has charted a unique and indispensable course in her deliberate and complex combination of figuration and abstraction. What results is a meditation on the personal. Fadojutimi poetically observes, “When I change, the work changes. We hold each other up. I think the biggest difference I notice is in myself. Having conversations around my work means I have been having more conversations around myself” (J. Fadojutimi, quoted in T. Moldan, “Jadé Fadojutimi: ‘When I change, the work changes,’” Ocula, November 24, 2021). A Thistle Throb is above all the impetus for a conversation.

A Thistle Throb has all the sensitivity to space and form as Paul Cezanne’s foundational still lifes. It creates its own world through a collage-like cosmos of pigment and line. An interesting comparison is to Cezanne’s Still Life with Blue Pot (1900-1906, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles), which, like A Thistle Throb, has a loosely pyramidal composition and features juxtapositions of blue and orange. Furthermore, not unlike the improvisations of Wassily Kandinsky, A Thistle Throb also has a lyrical element, as if it is comprised of floating musical notes. Like Kandinsky’s Blue Painting (1924, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York), A Thistle Throb allows color and form to work in tandem to create an orchestra. The artist states, “When I was really young, I wanted to be a fashion designer. And my dream is to be a composer. So now I call myself a composer of colour” (J. Fadojutimi, quoted in N. Trembley, Who is Jadé Fadojutimi, young painter already represented by mega-gallery Gagosian?,” Numero, March 31, 2023).

It is no mistake that Fadojutimi also mentions fashion. The verdant scene in A Thistle Throb connects to the interest in floral patterns by designers like Rodarte, Marni, and Anna Sui. Given the artist’s interest in Asian culture, one could look back to the Chinese state of Qi (1046 BCE–221 BCE), where purple was the center of fashion (China was also the first culture to create a synthetic purple). In a Western context, scientific advancements in the nineteenth century brought about the possibility of purple garments for common people and not just royalty. In this period, purple became a favorite of the Pre-Raphaelites, evinced by canvases like John Everett Millais’s, A Huguenot, on Saint Bartholomew’s Day, Refusing to Shield Himself from Danger by Wearing the Roman Catholic Badge (1851–1852). A Thistle Throb further democratizes a historically exclusive color, without forsaking its characteristic appeal and luxuriousness.

An inspiration to young artists, especially artists of color, Fadojutimi has mounted a solo show at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (2021), with additional exhibitions at the Hepworth Wakefield (2022) and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Torino (2023). Her work is held in important public collections like the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the Tate Collection, London, and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. She was also recently awarded a Luma Foundation residency in Arles, France, the famous inspiration for many of Vincent van Gogh’s paintings.
As epitomized by the capaciousness of A Thistle Throb, Fadojutimi is above all a generous and community-oriented artist. She says, “I want my canvases to be spaces where people maybe recognize themselves and think, ‘I see this, and that’s okay, but why do I see this? And what does that mean to me?’ (J. Fadojutimi, quoted in N. Trembley, Who is Jadé Fadojutimi?,” Numero, March 31, 2023). Though A Thistle Throb, with its dense application of paint, is opaque and not a mirror, we can find ourselves in it. With abstraction, each viewer can form their own relationship to a painting and connect it to their lived experiences. While A Thistle Throb might evoke modernist painting and fashion, it could also be linked by viewers to textiles, landscape painting, and painted Chinese stoneware. Fadojutimi encourages us to bring our stories to this canvas, even as she shares her stories with us. In so doing, she makes a powerful argument for the ongoing relevance of painting.