Kayode Ojo “The Aviator”

Martos Gallery

This event has ended.

A great tale often carries two arcs to the story: one where everything goes right, and the other where everything goes wrong. Such is the storyline for Martin Scorsese’s 2004 biopic “The Aviator,” and for Kayode Ojo’s second exhibition with Martos Gallery. For this exhibition, Ojo considers the value of both successes and failures, the ones we see and the ones we don’t see.

The exhibition features new sculpture-as-installation. For The Aviator, Ojo maintains a sense of servitude of “the object” but here, it is both as single compositions and in serial repetition. What happens when you uncover the life of an object in stages? Scant moments of opulence shine throughout the space and richness is revealed in the clarity of things and it all somehow feels part of a prolific moment.

With this new body of work, Ojo has written a tale considering what we can see versus what remains invisible to the naked eye, the transparent versus the opaque. Combining rigid forms with delicate arrangements and seriality aims to create a very public distraction while hiding the private and perhaps, in doing so, trapping your own secrets. Ojo invites the viewer to play an active role in this epic tale of frivolity and self-preservation; There is a moment when a path must be chosen, if not carved out, and we must bear witness to the outcome, either the genius or the madness of it all.

Kayode Ojo (b. 1990, Cookeville, TN) received a BFA from the School of Visual Arts. He currently lives and works in New York.
Select exhibitions include: “Never Been Kissed,” Praz Dellavelade, Los Angeles (2019); “You dressed him like me?,” Giardino Segreto, Milan, Italy (2019); “Equilibrium,” Martos Gallery, New York, NY (2018); “Betrayal,” Galerie Balice Hertling, Paris, France (2018); “Closer,” Sweetwater, Berlin (2018); “Zoe Leonard, Kayode Ojo,” curated by Laura Hunt, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, NY (2018); “Invisible Man,” Martos Gallery, New York, NY (2017)