Adesola Yusuf, known as Arclight (Nigerian, b. 1997), is a multidisciplinary artist from Lagos who merges photography, digital illustration and traditional painting into vibrant collage-based work. Describing his practice as a visual soliloquy, he uses saturated, contrasting colour to explore self-awareness and the sociopolitical realities of daily life in Lagos.
Yusuf, whose full name is Abdulrahman Adesola Yusuf, graduated from Yaba College of Technology with a Higher National Diploma in graphic design in 2018. His visual language draws on the High Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo periods alongside Pop Art and Post-Internet Art, and he has cited Vincent Van Gogh and Afrofuturism as references. He credits the Cuban-born artist Magdiel Lopez with drawing him toward collage-making and his heavy use of colour. His compositions recur around two symbols: arrows, standing for pain, death and evil, and flowers, standing for growth, youth, life and beauty.
