This June, Rele Lagos presents a dual exhibition by David Ngaji and David “Kaydee” Otaru, two emergent voices from Nigeria whose practices explore myth, the mind, and the human condition through divergent painterly vocabularies. Though they share a name and roots in the Young Contemporaries programme, their trajectories have evolved in distinct directions.
David Ngaji, a University of Benin graduate in Painting, constructs symbolic figurations and visual cosmologies that probe metaphysical tensions between man and the divine, memory and myth. His work positions the body as a site of ontological inquiry, drawing on ritual, allegory, and collective psychic inheritance.
David “Kaydee” Otaru, also from Edo State, is a self-taught painter whose hybrid practice blends traditional technique with digital aesthetics. His recent body of work engages the phenomenology of neurodivergence, specifically ADHD, through fragmented composition, surreal spatialities, and the use of negative imaging. These paintings shift in meaning depending on the viewer’s lens, rewarding acts of deep looking, disruption, and technological intervention.
Both artists engage with classical narrative structures while fracturing them; Ngaji through symbolic clarity, Otaru through perceptual distortion
