Luke Agada: To Translate is to Move Across
moniquemeloche is pleased to present To Translate is to Move Across, a solo exhibition of new works by Lagos-born Luke Agada. Agada’s work investigates the forces of globalization, migration, and cultural dislocation, situating them within a postcolonial context to explore how they shape the emergence of new cultural forms. Heavily inspired by the writings of Homi Bhabha and his concept of the “third space”–a psychological realm of cultural hybridity and negotiation where identities are not fixed but constantly changing–Agada’s surrealist paintings hover between form and fluidity. The Bhabhaian concept states that individuals in the third space constantly navigate between different cultural influences and adapt their identities to their new environment–something alto familiar to Agada who emigrated to the US in 2021 to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for his MFA. Agada, who now resides in Chicago, contends with how home has come to mean more than one place. For the artist’s first full solo exhibition with the gallery since graduating in 2023, the works in To Translate is to Move Across articulate a vision of movement that defies rigid categorization, exposing the hybrid, unstable, and fluid nature of meaning and belonging.
Agada’s paintings inhabit the in-between, rendering translation as both subject and practice. His compositions draw from abstract expressionism and surrealism; his color palettes blend the sun scorched tones of his native landscape with the rich color palettes of the Old Masters and Baroque painters; his forms materialize memory, imagination, and observed reality. Yet, as a whole, they align not to one source or fidelity, but rather encompass a visual form of displacement, where elements migrate, meanings shift, and identities fracture and recombine. However, translation is not seamless. It is uneven, unstable, and often ruptured. Agada examines these occurrences through his process by in which texture and surface tension straddle representation and spatial ambiguity. Paint is layered–sometimes with dry brush application–shifted, removed, and reworked revealing earlier strata. But while the artist invites spontaneous influence and unexpected forms, he ultimately retains a sensitive control over the compositions – a delicate struggle between figurative elements and abstraction.
As an extension of Agada’s painting practice, a series of new charcoal drawings on canvas offers a quieter, more intimate counterpoint. Stripped of color and painterly texture, Agada’s drawings trace elusive, interconnected lines that resemble neural pathways, visualizing a more internal, psychological terrain and are perhaps the core structures that underpin his exploration of identity in flux.
In a time marked by escalating cultural and political fragmentation, Luke Agada’s work invites thoughtful engagement with the politics of shared spaces–those fraught, often contested zones shaped by histories of movement, displacement, and transformation. Here, Agada frames translation not as a neat resolution, but as survival, adaptation, and reimagination. To Translate is to Move Across asks us to linger in ambiguity, not to resolve it, and to consider how art becomes a means not of closure, but of continual negotiation.
