REVIEW Nov 2025 Lawyartist NEON

Jo Manby

Exhibiting a sequence of new work in his solo show, NEON II, which ran from 7 – 9 November, 2025 at Stone Yard Studio, Loughborough, artist Adetunji Onigbanjo creates synthetically choreographed linear patterns where white lines surge across the canvas. The Fourdrinier editor Jo Manby explores his creative output.

The effect is obsessive and compulsive – but without the disorder. These frenetically spreading marks appear ready to burst from the confines of the two-dimensional canvas in rhythmic, liquid, cosmic form. If you could trace the movement of dancing figures in a club with a white line, this is what you would get. Behind the white lines (think sportswear and trainers, road markings and strobes), the brilliant colours of lighting gels, glamour wigs, and neon make-up burst through with equivalent intensity.

Onigbanjo’s work alternates between calming and absorbing, vibrant and alive. With each twist and turn of his mark-making, there are glimpses of the anthracite sheen of a vinyl record or the reverberation of a bass line. In this sense, the work has the capacity to transport its audience to another place, whether that is a space of rhythm, music and dance or a dream of a distant idyllic future.

From the shimmering lights of the dancefloor to the reflective surface of the sea, Onigbanjo’s NEON series creates a constantly shifting, lopping effect. Like the light reflections on a stretch of ocean – where water is subject to the influence of undercurrents, airborne thermals and the gravity of the earth and moon – his white lines perform an endless dance, swirling like eddying liquid.

There are many affinities between Onigbanjo’s work and pop culture. There are elements that chime with the Memphis design group. Memphis was a group brought together by Ettore Sottsass in 1980, who produced a dazzling array of clashing shapes, ricrac and zigzag designs, often using colourful plastic laminate, influenced by Art Deco and Pop Art, with a sense of humour and joyfulness that inspired fashion collections by design houses such as Dior and Missoni.

Analysing the title of NEON IV (Deep Zima Blue) (2024), one can deduce the reference to the animated series ‘Love, Death and Robots’. Zima, the protagonist of the sci-fi cartoon, is an AI-artist renowned for making artworks that contain a precise but elusive colour of blue. In the episode ‘Zima Blue’, his work becomes stratospherically expansive, encompassing large areas of the cosmos. Adetunji has drawn a parallel here between him creating his fourth Neon piece and Zima constantly searching for his magnum opus.

Onigbanjo’s work, with its chrome brilliance of underlying colour and looping pathways of crosshatched tonality, gives a similar impression of a visual art contagion. A spreading, multiplying, accumulating pattern that takes hold and seems to reproduce itself. The rhythm of his drawings mimics the cumulative behaviour of algorithms, feeding on data, replicating, building on themselves. There is an inherent implication of infinity: once a pattern has begun, it could be endlessly extended in any direction.