Ife Digital Arts
Ife Art Reviews
Nigerian Market Scene
Title: Meat and Fish Seller in a Nigerian market
Digital Art Review:
Ife stands out among other artists for her ability to depict reality and the cultural environment in the most vivid and lively colors. In this artwork, the emphasis is on the busyness and diligence of the seller regarding his product. As if through a magnifying glass, the viewer has the opportunity to immerse themselves in the importance of what is happening. And this is what is happening in reality: if you are looking for a fresh, high-quality meat and fish in a Nigerian market, you specifically focus on the tables with this product and its seller.
Notice the colors symmetry - how harmoniously the shadow merges with the sunlight, the earth, the movement. Blue and earthy, red and brown are the colors of passion, play, and balance. Aren't these also the primary colors for foods like fish and meat? Color is like life; that's what Ife Malomo is trying to tell us in this painting.
Nigerian Market Scene
Title: Assorted peppers 1
Digital Art Review:
Symmetry, synchronicity, alchemy of color, and narrative - that's what strikes in this painting. This pepper counter seems to have no beginning or end. Seething and iridescent, sprawling and free, it announces its presence. No invented characters are here, and nobody is posing. Life itself is caught in this moment. Pepper River - as a business, as a movement, as a promotion, as a goal. And the sellers, like the boat owners, confidently head on the endless red wave of prosperity and thirst for sensations.
As if thrown by a passerby walking through the market, a look from above gives this artwork a lot of intimacy, nakedness, truth. Often, what is captured occasionally is a real art because it will never be repeated in the same sequence, with the same light, emotions, and forms.
Nigerian Celebration Scene
Title: Celebrating with drums 1
Digital Art Review:
Energy, movement, multiplication, connection, attraction - Ife Malomo's painting Celebrating with drums 1 entices the viewer to feel all these sensations and emotions all at once. When we celebrate, we seem to merge and unite energetically with other people, the environment, and the celebration instruments. We become one, a whirlpool of color, sound, form, and spirit. Ife Malomo demonstrates this divine fusion visually, working with abstract brushstrokes and feathering of borders and silhouettes.
Pay attention to the dance of color, which always remains regular, natural, alive. The perspectives Ife works with always give the feeling of a living presence as if the painting is a living memory that can be lived again and again just by looking at it.
Nigerian Celebration Scene
Title: Celebrating with drums 2
Digital Art Review:
Not every artist can convey the spirit of celebration like Ife. In this painting, Celebrating with drums 2, Ife manages to visually depict the energy and movement of this process and convey the emotions of the jubilance, leaving everywhere expressive faces and explicit emotions. Some figures are quite vague, and at the same time, it is possible to understand what they are doing, who they are looking at, how their body is expressing joy.
Ife’s signature is also read in a symbiosis of geometric and abstract when everything begins at a certain point and grows at different levels. We can also see the spectators of this action - they play an equally important role in the background - to give the viewer the feeling that they are in a crowd of cheering, dancing, and rejoicing people, in reality, full of color, beautiful chaos, and details.
Nigerian Market Scene 6
Title: Assorted peppers 2
Digital Art Review:
This painting will appeal to all connoisseurs of folk and digital art. On the surface, it may seem that this is just a perfect working moment. Instead, Ife works with a more complex structure of visual storytelling – like a magician of time-lapse, she can capture both the state of the subject (physical, emotional) and the reality around this subject. Actions could happen quickly in this reality, but in the painting, it seems possible to look at the action before it happened - in its floating, free pace.
Look at the "horizon" of products - it seems like it leads the viewer into an unknown dimension, full of discoveries and colors. Assorted peppers 2 becomes the beginning of the story, a ticket to the unknown world of the Nigerian market, which is in the here and now, without borders and long distances.
Nigerian Market Scene
Title: Fresh and packaged fruit
Digital Art Review:
On the Nigerian market, you can find everything your heart desires. Some markets are famous for the best quality, choice, and freshness of fruits. Ife Malomo, in her artistic journey, does not leave behind the opportunity to talk about this incredible experience. An important fact in her work is that subjects and objects are not explicitly arranged for composition and color. All charm, colors, and composition belong to the creators of these market scenes.
Here, the artist's talent shines - in the ability to convey naturalness, authenticity, intimacy, and the mystery of market scenes. The choreography of feathered digital strokes and the blurring of distant subjects create a clear sense of focusing on the most important aspects. Colors - as a synonym for freshness, readiness, talk about Fresh and packaged fruit.
Nigerian Market Scene
Title: Bargaining 1
Digital Art Review:
Bargaining on the Nigerian market is a mandatory ritual, without which the market would not be what it is today. This kind of language arises between the seller and the buyer, during which the product acquires a particular value, meaning, and significance. Ife explored Nigeria as her parent's country of origin, and once she saw how these markets work, she wanted to convey the bargaining scene most realistically.
In this painting, two semantic parallels can be traced: the product's and bargaining process's significance and detailing. The image of products is characterized by a remarkable precision and focus on details such as shape, color, silhouette, shadow. It has its meaning because the product for bargaining should be attractive, prominent, bright.
The bargaining process focuses on emotions and body position. Here, the buyer's mood is important, as much as his choice and presence in the moment of anticipation of buying a product at a beneficial price. It is not for nothing that the artist accentuates the fall of light precisely on the top of the leaves pile, as if "shining" through the figure of the buyer.
Nigerian Market Scene
Title: Bargaining 2
Digital Art Review:
Bargaining 2 is a unique piece of art from Ife Malomo, creator of incredibly vibrant and colorful digital art. Ife works very hard on storytelling, symmetry, and color layers in her work. The Bargaining 2 perfectly visualizes her work on the composition – grain bags seem to gurgle, splash out, float to the surface, surrounding buyers, luring and seducing them with their smell, appearance, price. The contrast of red and gold is used here for the first time and carries its own significance: bargaining for a gold price, passion, and desire to win a golden grain.
Red and gold are also perceived as the soil and the sun, merging every morning and evening, filling each other. As a soil product, grain is saturated with both the soil and the sun, and now it is time to put a price on this treasure. Note that some of the customers' clothes also match the color of the bags and fabrics sold at the counter. The feel of red as a haggling spirit makes this digital pieceis especially important in the Nigerian Market Scene series.
Nigerian Market Scene
Title: Bargaining 3
Digital Art Review:
Visual rendering of color is a particular skill of an artist working in digital art. Ife painting Bargaining 3 stands out for its contrast and detail. The focus falls on a basket of bananas, depicted in all their natural beauty - with dry tips, spots, and various lengths. This symbol contrasts with a floral ornament on the seller's clothes, which serves as a mirroring background that enhances the bananas' appearance. Bananas are in the spotlight; they are the meaning of bargaining.
Note the symbolic confrontation and mixture of such symbols as the banana and the flower ornament of the clothes - they both symbolize nature, its creatures, and significance in our daily life. Like the bargaining ritual, it is indispensable in the Nigerian market. This means that, as a phenomenon, it also becomes part of nature, a natural phenomenon for the African people.
Nigerian Market Scene
Title: Bargaining 6
Digital Art Review:
Ife usually prefers to combine the abstract with the details in her artworks. In Bargaining 6, the digital artist decides to cross this line and give her work of art more color, mystery, form, and playfulness. The frame of the buyer looking at the fabrics looks very documentary-like. It seems like a woman is choosing this fabric very slowly, almost unmoving.
Bargaining is a phenomenon in the Nigerian market that happens continuously. Here, time freezes in the moment of choice, anticipation, decision, opportunity. The bargaining process turns into pleasure, spreading over the canvas with various ornaments, patterns, drawings, sketches from reality. Blurred edges give the impression of a fresh memory coming from thinking about the fabric market.
Bargaining 6 is not just visual storytelling on a canvas; it is a memory captured in colors that comes to life to everyone, whether it is a viewer who knows the Nigerian market or someone who has never been there.
Nigerian Market Scene
Title: Searching 1
Digital Art Review:
The reality in the paintings of Ife is very pure, dynamic, and all-encompassing. The digital painting Searching 1 is unique in a series of paintings from the Nigerian Market Scene. Here the artist opens to us facial traits of her character, or instead, her hero because all the subjects depicted on Ife’s canvas are real people.
This painting is also unique because it depicts the need of the buyer - his search for the right product or object. Even in her chaotically shaded manner of digital strokes, Ife conveys a moment of thoughtfulness, interest, concentration, or even confusion. All these emotions have a place at the Nigerian street market. This is a subtle cultural truth - there are a lot of markets in Nigeria, they are huge, and the number of products on them is staggering. The search becomes a quest, a goal, a job. Searching 1 confirms the choice and the meaning of the purchase on such a market.
The painting carries a semantic load on the hero who is searching and conveys a feeling of confusion and a slight negligence in reality fragments in the background. Like a test in watercolor, these fragments of stalls, buildings, and nature are also in search, identified with the hero. The search here does not carry negative energy - it enriches, stimulates, and brings the viewer closer to the reality of the Nigerian cultural and economic environment.
Nigerian Celebration
Title: Drums 8
Digital Art Review:
The drum is an integral part of African culture and music celebrations. Made from natural ingredients, it sounds like nature, trees, and thunder. Power, desire, freedom, liberation flows in its sound. Ife, as a documentary-like digital artist, has a talent for capturing living moments of reality in all their brilliance and strength. Drums 8 conveys the extraordinary energy of engagement through the technique of visual recursion. Everything is in motion, dancing and celebrating as long as the one who sets the rhythm is in the spotlight
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Rhythm centers us, brings us back to the here and now. The floral symmetry of the ornament on the clothes also has its own rhythm - even though the faces of others are blurred, the ornament remains in place. It moves in parallel with the drum, literally. Celebration as movement, emotions, and beauty are the values that Ife wants to convey in her work.
Nigerian Market Scene
Title: Balancing Act 1
Digital Art Review:
How much strength and skill does it take to carry objects and food on your head? Balancing as art is viewed differently in different cultures. In Africa, balancing is a part of everyday life, and in the Nigerian market, this phenomenon is quite common. In this work of art, Ife perfectly conveys the feeling of balancing - lightness, aspiration, smooth movement. A perfectly centered stance that doesn't even require hand balance. This woman is shopping or returning from the market, and still, her food on her head is balanced amid market chaos and turmoil.
Notice two streaks running from the woman's head and continuing on her load. It seems like this connection between head and weight is inextricable, smooth, and essential. Balancing in real life works exactly like this, and it takes place even when it seems to us that we are not moving.
Nigerian Market Scene
Title: Bargaining 9
Digital Art Review:
It is hard not to notice the juiciness of this painting - Bargaining 9 is full of bright, tasty colors that seduce the imagination and smell. So does Oil Mill Market, the famous Nigerian fruit and vegetable market. It is difficult to resist the choice, the fresh look, and the smell of the wealth of African land. You have to bargain for this wealth - this is the sacred ritual of buying and selling in the market. Ife demonstrates this cultural feature on her canvas, depicting a customer looking at a product. Multi-layered, like temples, fruit and vegetable riches grow before her eyes. At some point, her silhouette becomes part of this luxury, as if merging with the whispering odorous products. If the sensations and emotions of being at the fruit and vegetable market had one name, they would be called Bargaining 9.
Nigerian Market Scene
Title: Meat Seller at Bodija Market 1
Digital Art Review:
In Meat Seller at Bodija Market 1, Ife departs from her usual color and abstract technique and returns to a more realistic depiction of the Nigerian Market Scene. And this is true because the Nigerian market is a lot of details, shapes, sounds, and meanings. The moment's authenticity conveys its imperfection, carelessness, randomness, and even some clogging. Who said that art should be pure, correct, combined, convenient?
According to Ife’s vision, art is reality - where this meat seller looks at his product in thought, waiting for the buyer's arrival with whom he can bargain; where the meat lies the way it's laid down, and not the way it needs to be laid down to sell it. Many values of pleasure from the process, love for one's work is inherent in this artwork. How great would it be to meet this meat seller to learn from him the art of lightness and airiness amid continuous movement, chaos, and multiple choices?
​Nigerian Market Scene
Title: Balancing Act 2
Digital Art Review:
The most intimate, subtle, and the natural moment is to see someone balancing. Between work and family, on a circus tightrope, or holding a food platter on your head. Is it unique, or is it just normal? Where is the boundary between a particular skill and everyday life need? Ife asks these questions as she portrays a woman carrying and balancing food from a Nigerian street market on her head. She names this artwork Balancing Act 2, although looking at this work more and more, Balancing Art 2 comes to mind.
The absolute calmness, focus, and concentration of this woman are impressive. The digital art becomes something like an attractive magnet, which centers you emotionally every time. It is no coincidence that Ife also works here on soft earthy and pastel colors, even though bright, contrasting colors usually dominate in her arsenal.
This artwork is about centering, connection and attention; about the interest in getting to know one African woman passing by, who knows how to balance in broad daylight in motion and stillness.
Nigerian Market Scene
Title: Bargaining 3
Digital Art Review:
Bargaining 3 is one of Ife’s more mysterious paintings from the Nigerian Market Scene series. Ife leaves the viewer alone with guesses: what are these products, who is this, where is the bargaining process going on here, is anyone trading at all? The floating composition of digital strokes creates the effect of the infinity of the counter, like a conveyor carrying new and new products on its surface.
The harmony of the layers is evident here, which speaks of consistency and mirroring what is happening. Look at the bottom of the painting, starting in black-brown and moving to red and yellow-orange. The same thing happens from above - gray-brown colors turn into red-orange. The figure in the middle becomes a connection point between these two realities, a catalyst for their energy.
Ife uses this graphic magic to capture the bargaining spirit of the Nigerian market. It is everywhere - in the air and on the ground. You feel like a magician winning a reasonable price for a perfect product.