Rafiy Okefolahan’s painting navigates the tension between abstraction and figuration, using impasto, chromatic intensity, and gesture to transmit collective memory. Rooted in West African communal life and Vodoun cosmology, his work positions the body as a site of endurance, movement, and shared history.
In Rafiy Okefolahan’s paintings, figures surface from dense storms of pigment—not as portraits, but as carriers of collective memory. Built through thick impasto, abrupt chromatic collisions, and urgent gesture, his work sustains a productive tension between figuration and abstraction, where bodies emerge, dissolve, and reassemble within the same canvas. Rooted in lived experience rather than representation,
Okefolahan’s practice engages West African communal life, ritual, and labor as conditions of being. Movement, endurance, and transmission recur across the work: dancers suspended in saturated color fields, figures immersed in sensory states rather than landscapes, bodies bearing weight—physical and symbolic—without collapse. Animal figures, particularly roosters, function as threshold presences within a Vodoun-inflected cosmology—neither anecdotal nor decorative, but intermediaries between human, spiritual, and ecological realms.
Color operates as both emotional force and political insistence: saturated magentas, ceruleans, and incandescent oranges assert vitality against erasure and refusal against simplification. Describing himself as a “messenger of the people,” Okefolahan conceives painting as transmission—where personal gesture meets collective history. His canvases remain resolutely human: volatile, tender, and attentive to what is at risk of disappearing, and to what still demands care.