You can nearly hear the jewellery clanging, envision fabric ruffling against the body or sense the quiet amid two figures. Her figures authorize themselves to be seen lacking surrendering themselves completely to the viewer.
Luchong’s most prominent achievement may be that, in a world increasingly shaped by speed, scrolling and shortened attention spans, she has laboured her time to create art that will continually hold your gaze.
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The share Negotiating Portraits as Sites For Identity and Selfhood in Luchong’s Portraiture appeared opening on BellaNaija – Showcasing Africa to the world. Vulnerability finds a place before the terminate of masculinity minus stripping the body of its strength.
Then there is A Book on Manipulation, in which five figures pose for what initially appears to be a family portrait. Your interpretation completes it. The sitter is not easily being looked at; they additionally determine, or are allowed to choose, how they will appear.
Rendering this multiplicity on canvas is a reason over, delicate skill that Gladys John, a multidisciplinary artist effective under the name Luchong, has developed together with striking precision. Like Renike Olusanya, she works together with vivid colour and expression, paying finish attention to hair, clothing, bodies and self-presentation. The hair and eyebrows are textured, recognisably Black and African, whilst the patterned garment is marked by lines that resemble cracks. The painting refuses to resolve the query. You do. Her paintings operate like nested poems: interior to the colour is a encounter, interior to the experience is an eye, and within the eye is an interior world of emotion and receive. Her portraits become sites where identity is presented, interpreted and reshaped throughout the act of looking.
Does My Smile Build You Uncomfortable? by Luchong
In Does My Smile Build You Uncomfortable? (2026), the smile gets you primary.
Gladys John, aka Luchong
Nigerian-born, Los Angeles-based artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby describes portrait photographs as an possibility for the sitter to “curate and reveal the world who they were (or desired to be).” Her observation points to the agency of the people being depicted. You commence to wonder what you are witnessing. In Repair, blue is not merely applied to the canvas; it becomes cloth, rendered throughout ruffles, folds and texture. Realism grounds them in bodies, clothing, culture and category; surrealism opens these forms onto inner lives that cannot be fully explained by appearance.
Na Man Yo Be No Mean Tell E No Pain You by Luchong
In Na Man Yo Be No Mean State E No Pain You, she paints a masculine figure whose expression complicates the usual operation of masculinity. Each encounter carries its own tension, suggesting a story that cannot be contained by the setup of the bodies. The body is never isolated from the world that shapes it. The longer you witness the painting, the greater unstable your opening interpretation becomes. You look for to learn their tribe, the story that brought them together and what connects them. In her solo demonstrate Woman Like Me, aspects of the self revenue across the images. Across colour, line, texture and pattern, she explores the complexities and dualities of the self. Her attention to clothing, hair, jewellery and other adornments gives these materials a life of their own. Her paintings possess a gentle of visual onomatopoeia; they create the unseen audible in the imagination.
This attention to interior life extends to her self-portraits. The self-portrait becomes another negotiation betwixt seeing and being seen.
At the uncertainty of sounding precious, Luchong’s mastery of expression recalls the mythology surrounding the Mona Lisa: the concept that her eyes adhere to you roughly the room and that her expression changes depending on where you stand. Then you announcement their eyes and the mood shifts. Luchong’s paintings do not transform as you travel approximately them. Then, if you stay, other details interrupt it. Their gazes are handbook but defended, as if they are trying to decipher something beyond the noticeable frame. Is it Black girl joy, a victory laugh or laughter covering trauma? At earliest, their bodies convey warmth. The image is beautiful at opening glance, and that cultural beauty virtually distracts you. Her paintings inquire to be seen, and they moreover invite us to suppose what cannot be seen or heard. Two women occupy the frame, one behind the other. They are not feeling the same thing. Read at present!.
They appear conclude and relaxed; they could be sisters or friends. What connects these practices is sustained care for the figure and the world approximately it; a commitment to representing Black women including complexity, tenderness and agency.
Luchong is fundamentally a storyteller as the figures she paints possess lives that start prior to the painting and will promote following the viewer leaves. Luchong’s portraits produce room for the contradiction that a experience can hold tenderness and suspicion, intimacy and distance, safety and fear at once.
Luchong is equally prudent to what surrounds the body. Their pleasure lies partly in this invitation to look beyond what is immediately understandable. The figures are recognisable and materially provide, although the emotional worlds adjacent to them are nearly fluid. Then you look at their faces, and the category begins to come apart. The woman in Luchong’s paintings is not merely a material being observed; she is additionally individual constructing an image of herself. Each figure has a lore.
A Book on Manipulation by Luchong
This attention to the figure places Luchong’s task in conversation including other Nigerian artists who have made Black bodies, particularly Black women, principal to their practices. There are furthermore points of approach alongside Chigozie Obi, whose labor draws from women’s everyday experiences, Igbo culture and the preservation of standard, intimate moments. By manner of acrylic on canvas, Luchong demonstrates a remarkable command of skin tone and colour, whilst her attention to the body’s surface repeatedly leads us towards what lies beneath it.
Her paintings strike an intriguing balance in the middle of realism and surrealism. It is so fitting that her activity has moved naturally into conversation including poetry.
Her duo exhibition Prior to I Learned to Conceal, presented alongside poet Faith Moyosore Agboola at St Margaret’s Gallery in Norwich, brought a integrated juxtaposition of visual art and poetry. Leonardo da Vinci famously described painting as “poetry which is seen and not heard” and poetry as “a painting which is heard but not seen,” but I consider Luchong’s task complicates this distinction. Even though you are looking at a confront, nothing on it can be taken at experience value.
The same tension appears in Maintain Me Low-exposure (2026). The figure is allowed to appear as somebody who can feel, hurt and persist unresolved.
Source: Negotiating Portraits as Sites For Identity and Selfhood in Luchong’s Portraiture
