With a background in theatre, law, and later theatre again, Adébayo Bolaji didn’t start painting on purpose. In fact, it wasn’t until his body physically demanded it that he began exploring colours, shapes, and his voice as an artist.

“Because my father came [to London] from Nigeria at a particular time, I grew up in a very specific background that was, you could say, highly conservative in terms of education,” he tells me over Zoom, explaining that although he was a child actor, his parents had specific academic expectations for him. “As a young Black guy, my father would say things like, ‘look, when you go into a creative space, the world objectifies you. But when you can stand in a space and intellectually speak your ideas, people are intimidated by that. I trust that you will always be able to go back to a creative space. But academia, the gift of education, is very much limited. And I don’t want you to waste that.’”

Although he understood his father’s rationale, it wasn’t the life he wanted, and his body understood that clearly. He moved through the steps, studying law and getting the degree, but he slowly shut people out and became entirely withdrawn. “Getting up in the morning felt like I had bricks on my head. I was non-existent, just living through the motions,” he explains. “And then at some point, it caught up with me.”

Bolaji takes a deep breath before telling me about his final straw moment, a day that woke him up forever, in which he lost all ability to taste, feel, or walk without losing breath. He recalls waiting in the hospital for a diagnosis, but hearing from the doctor that nothing was physically wrong. It was entirely stress-induced. It was psychological. From that moment on, with the reassurance of his mom telling him she cares only of his happiness, he felt free to live life fresh and start over, exploring the world through a new lens.

And, when he heard his cousin playing an old video of him performing, he knew what that new universe of his would look like. The release he felt from artistic pursuits came rushing back. “That was the genesis of getting back into a creative space. It hadn’t revealed itself as painting yet, but it was the start,” he tells me with a smile.

Stepping back into acting was the first step, but it wasn’t long before he began drawing every second of every day. “With acting, your creativity is dependent on what someone else produces. So as an actor, my outlet is based on someone writing a part for me. Someone needed to create a space or an opportunity before I got to release. But painting was different,” he explains. “I’ve always done this where I would write out words and thoughts and kind of doodle. Every time I was writing, it would just turn into drawing. I was doing these heads, big eyes. And I’d get lost in it, it was an escape. And my body kept telling me to draw. From then on, I was doing it nonstop, every single moment, every day.”

“At first it was just healing, getting everything off your chest. Then I started to look at everything and asked, ‘what am I talking about?’” In the case of his current solo show, TO SPEAK OUT LOUD, the answer to this question is multileveled.

“Artists make work for themselves and sometimes they don’t know why they’re making it. And then all of a sudden you have curation. You have to curate or fill a space for a particular time. And people have to understand the narrative or just understand something. I asked myself the question, ‘what is the thing that I’m really interested in?’ The first thing was confidence. I’ve met so many crazy talented people in different contexts who don’t feel confident in what they do, and it comes down to what someone believes about themselves or their voice. Or sometimes, they don’t even know they have one.”

“So then I was thinking about what over the years has really affected me in regards to the voice,” he continues, explaining the deep effect that the EndSARS protests had on him. “I was born in London, but I have a Nigerian background. And what [the protests] did, not necessarily for the rest of the world on a constant basis, but what it did for the youth in Nigeria was really empower them to come together and speak out. And it was that social-political event that stirred up this idea that connected the dots to my conversation about the voice, about the individual.”

With these ideas as the starting point to the body of work, he set off on exploring voice in non-literal manners. “The event in Nigeria was the impetus rather than a direct line,” he clarifies. “It was about finding the entrance point into where I could have a visual meditation and reflection about ideas of the voice. I think a piece of artwork, just like a movie or a song or a piece of music, doesn’t necessarily have to bang someone on the head. What it can do is open something inside you where you look at something and something is changing inside you, and you want to keep looking. And it’s prodding you, you want to keep asking yourself more questions.”

Throughout the ten paintings in the collection, they all have a black background that is different from Bolaji’s typical style. Where his colours normally pop out of the canvas at first glance, here they’re presented in a different manner — one he calls “beautifully sombre.” Painted on top of the background are figures, which he tells me are “kind of like lessons” with “their own narratives and stories.”

The hero image, one Bolaji is particularly proud of, is a great example of this. Titled “I AM HERE”, it features a woman with her hands out to the side and her mouth open wide. “She could be singing or screaming or several things,” he tells me. “The title plus the sense of space, what she’s wearing and the gesture, is, for me, a way for someone to look and question themselves.”

And when walking into the exhibition space, these questions no doubt fill the viewers’ minds. What do you believe in? Who are you? What do you want? Getting to have their own experience with the body of work, something that is crucial to Bolaji in the artistic process, they are left to interpret the themes with their own backgrounds and experiences as a basis. “The gift I get is from making the work, and then I leave people alone for them to have their moment with it,” he explains. “It feels good when people write to me or they share the work and say what it does for them, but I try not to indulge in that, because I don’t think that’s a safety net. People need what they need in the day, for a moment. We’re naturally going to gravitate to what helps us for now, and then we’re going to gravitate to what helps us tomorrow. The work is helping them right now and then they’re going to move on.”

Though with such powerful work, it’s easy to say that the impact will last in people’s minds forever.

TO SPEAK OUT LOUD is open now at Galerie Kremers in Berlin. For more information, click here.