Slawn: “As humans, we view time as our enemy, we’re scared of it”

“Art is time,” skater-turned-painter Slawn tells me on a cold December morning in The City of London following the premier of his latest installation, ‘Gone?’, splashed across screens in Piccadilly Circus. “It’s a bunch of time capsules. When you look at it you see a moment in that artist’s life.” We’re in the basement of his cafe Beau Beau’s; a space which has served as a hub for the 23-year-old’s community of skaters and creatives for the better part of this year. Its location was previously Benk and Bo, a cafe which I had frequented and I noticed some familiar faces still on staff today. The London-based, Nigerian-born artist’s paintings now hang on almost every wall in the venue imbuing it with a brighter, more playful energy. “I’m not a greedy person,” he says. “This is a community space, an ongoing gathering. This is a place where conventional time doesn’t exist. People meet each other here and go on to do other things together.”

Last winter, I wrote that “‘Time is neither linear nor cyclical, but rather concurrent: the past, present, and future envelope each other in a similar manner to double and triple exposures found in experimental cinema”’. Gone? further crystallised this notion for me. The videos commissioned by the Culture Institute of Radical Contemporary Arts (CIRCA), see the artist locked in an empty unit under the Piccadilly Lights, creating site-specific paintings in the heart of London’s West End. Using bespoke perspex, scaled to match the screens’ dimensions, Slawn paints versions of his signature sardonic, grimacing cartoon figures. The results are an illusion of the artist gradually vanishing as his work forms directly onto our screens, leaving the lingering question: is all hope gone?

Even with all the buzz from the premier, Slawn seems sombre. “Gone? isn’t a point in time. Things are not ever really gone, they happened. That’s why there’s a question mark at the end of the title. I want people to think about time. As humans, we view time as our enemy, we’re scared of it. We feel like there is not enough time to do everything, but time is what makes being human special. Even if one day I’m not here, am I really gone? I left something, the work lives on forever.”

Gone? is set to screen on billboards in London, Lagos, Los Angeles, Berlin, Milan, Seoul, Tokyo, Accra and Nairobi until New Year’s Eve, with a different painting created for each city. It marks the first time that both CIRCA and Slawn have shown works in Africa. “I’m not British, I moved here from Nigeria around six years ago so this opportunity was a reminder of what I really should be doing,” he reveals, quickly pivoting to a tone of concern. “I think people back home are going to see the work and be like ‘That’s not art. What is that?’. In Nigeria, they call my art jagga jagga, which means rubbish or nonsense. Every kid’s drawings start as jagga jagga and they don’t get the chance to develop because of the lack of support. I want to make it seem like jagga jagga can be something. Everything can be something. We are in a world that was built by us. It’s all subjective. My art is meant to show kids they can start from nothing and grow, that there is hope.”

A palpable air of excitement fills the room when Slawn discusses his son Beau who appeared in a video on social media playing the piano alongside musician Frank Ocean the day before our conversation. “My son is amazing; he’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Just watching him grow makes me feel like I’ve renewed my life. He recently did a painting with me and they compared his work to Jackson Pollock. He’s one, so how did people end up at that conclusion? Did Jackson Pollock start out making nonsense first and then people made sense of it? Obviously, Pollock is a trained artist, but the comparisons just pushed me to question when anything becomes art.”

The role of memetics in Slawn’s practice is often overlooked. Earlier this year he implored his Instagram followers to create paintings and trade them in for one of his. This philosophy appears to guide much of his artistic process: “The work I make for my collectors is different from what I put out online because I want kids to think ‘I can do that’ and find themselves through trying. Even in the vacuum of space, there are still stars that shine bright. Even though between them there is immense darkness. If energy is infinite and time is infinite, then hope has to be infinite.”

 

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