Victoria Erioluwa
- Anna Lilli Garai
- 4 hours ago
- 4 min read
Victoria Erioluwa paints what many women carry but rarely say out loud. Her figures stand without faces, but never without presence. Through thick texture and bold color, she shapes bodies that hold memory, emotion, and truth. There’s weight in the surfaces, but also softness in how they lean on each other. Her work moves between faith, community, and selfhood, often beginning with stillness and ending in declaration. Each painting holds space — for reflection, for resistance, for recognition — especially among Black women, whose stories are too often blurred but never silent.
Q: You leave the faces blank, but the bodies feel full of life. What kind of presence are you trying to show?
A: Leaving the faces blank is a conscious choice. It is a way to shift the focus from individual identity to embodied experience—experiences shared, the ones that we talk about and the ones we don’t talk about. I want the viewer to engage with the figures in the paintings, the relationship between the figures beyond the immediate recognition of features or who the models are, to feel the presence in the gestures, postures, and the forms of each of my characters. The bodies are full of life because they carry stories, memory, experiences, and emotional weight.
By omitting the face, I invite people to project, to reflect, and to connect more deeply with the painting.
The presence I’m trying to convey with this is both an intimate and collective one, a feeling that transcends the personal and speaks to the shared human experience, especially within Black women.
Q: Thick paint, heavy strokes—your surfaces carry weight. What makes that texture matter to you?
A: By focusing on texture, contemporary artists have shifted the conversation around femininity from the visual to the tactile, offering more dynamic and nuanced interpretations of identity.
Ultimately, texture in these works offers a way to rethink not only the female form but also how we understand gender and its representations in art. Women artists have harnessed the power of texture and impasto in diverse ways, from expressing the emotional and physical realities of the female body to challenging traditional norms around femininity and beauty. I use texture to insist on presence. It creates a surface that feels lived in and unapologetically present. It matters to me because it holds the viewer in a slower kind of looking. You don’t just see it—you feel it, you feel the emotions while seeing the textures.
Q: “Pretty Girls Have Fupa” says a lot without saying much. What made you want to paint that truth?
A: “Pretty Girls Have Fupa” is a declaration. I was working on a body of painting that addresses the societal expectations of women, the beauty standard. The phrase itself is casual, even playful, but beneath it is a powerful affirmation: beauty doesn’t require shrinking yourself to fit into someone else's ideal—it is them accepting you as who you are. Fupa is cute, I find it cute, and painting about it was a way for me to celebrate the parts of ourselves we’re taught to hide. It’s about visibility and liberation, about saying, “I exist like this, and I am beautiful like this.”
Q: You’ve said your work is shaped by faith. How does that show up when you’re actually painting?
A: My faith isn’t always visible in symbols but mostly in actions. It shows up in the process, in the surrender. When I paint, I don’t always know exactly where the piece is going. Most times I have an idea of how I want the outcome to be, but it always ends up in a different way.
There’s a kind of trust I lean into, allowing Holy Spirit to guide my hand, my inspiration, and idea. That’s how faith lives in my work. It’s not just a belief system—it’s a practice of listening, of just allowing my hand to be guided, and of making space for something beyond me to move through me and show in my work.
Q: Your figures often lean on each other. What do you think about when you paint that kind of closeness?
A: The first theme I’ve always worked on was companionship, because I believe we all need each other. Growing up among the other gender made me wish for someone like me who I can call a sister, and I expressed that in my paintings. That kind of closeness is about trust, intimacy, and companionship. It reflects the tenderness within our community, especially among Black women.
Q: Your colors are bold, but the scenes stay calm. How do you strike that balance?
A: The calmness in the scenes from my paintings comes from my environment, the figures, their stillness, their quiet power. I’ve one way or the other found myself surrounded by nature. When I say nature, I mean environments where I am close with grass, fields, and trees. I want my subjects to feel centered and surrounded by that calmness, and still find themselves resonating with the works.
