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.
Yusuf typically photographs his own material, digitally manipulates the images, and transfers the results onto canvas, a process that can take two to three weeks per piece.His 2022 solo exhibition “ORDER & LAGOS” at GAZELL.iO Project Space included ORDER & LAGOS (come on fly with a broken wing), which sets a Black man with arrows piercing his wings against a bright blue sky, evoking government mismanagement and the divide between Lagos's lower and upper classes.,His sculptural piece SENTIMENT, made from spray-painted glasses adorned with elements of a neckpiece he owned as a teenager, revisits his earlier 2021 work YOUTH.
Yusuf has exhibited at ART X Lagos, AG18 gallery in Austria, and Art Dubai, where he has been a resident of Gazelli Art House's digital programme at Art Dubai Digital.,He released the limited edition digital print Waiting on Time… through Latitudes Limited in 2022.
