Pito Prince Builds Worlds Worth Guarding at AYÉ, The World We’ve Made exhibition

Michael Kolawole

Creating another world within the world is an intrinsic part of art. Every generation of image-makers builds a second layer over the one we already inhabit, populating it with figures that let us see our own faces more clearly.

That instinct plays out through two paintings by digital illustrator Prince Editorisee Pito, at AYÉ, “The World We’ve Made,” exhibition at the Old Street Gallery in London this August, which features work from Manali Rangnekar, Promise Amenkhienan, and Mmeseoma Peters. Pito’s work is one comic and one confrontational painting. Refusing to let the subjects of the pieces be docile for our imagination, he expects us to stare into their souls and reflect on their conditions.

The exhibition takes its title from the Yorùbá word for “world,” and Prince’s two works use that idea to look at the different faces and experiences that make up human life.

The artist takes one of the most disposable figures in Western visual culture, Frosty, the snowman, and gives him a scowl. A purple scarf is pulled tightly around his neck as though he is trying to protect himself from the cold, and his coal teeth are clenched into a hard, almost angry grin.

Prince described Frosty as a character that moves beyond childhood nostalgia into more expressive and unusual encounters of adulthood. And, truly, the transition is easy to see in the painting. Its top hat is crooked, with a torn brim which makes it look less like a magician’s accessory and more like an old hand-me-down that has seen better days. Jagged violet mountains cut into a sky streaked with static behind him. The familiar children’s figure suddenly looks tired. He is something made by other people’s hands, but appears to have developed an attitude of his own. With no cheerful smile, he cut a dejected figure staring back at the world that created him.

Friend or Foe approaches that unease differently. Painted in strong, saturated colours, a young woman in a pink tank top fills the centre of the canvas. Sitting somewhere between suspicion and careful appraisal, it’s hard to read her expression. Four other faces appear only as pale outlines behind her. They remain unfinished and unfilled, crowding the background as the mint green ground gradually deepens into violet around the shoulders.

Prince frames the piece as a study of trust and the many people who shape us. The choice to leave those surrounding faces incomplete is where that idea actually reflects on the canvas, asking whether the people around us are ever anything more than sketches we colour in ourselves.

The painting carries a life beyond the gallery wall too, having served as the official single cover for Nntathuggg’s 2024 track “Run Away,” a detail that suits a work already asking what it means for a face to become the surface other people project onto.

Frosty succeeds most as character work but falters slightly on composition. The linework has plenty of characters that distort the image’s meaning. Its uneven brim, the crooked hat, even the eyebrows seem to be doing more emotional work than the eyes underneath them.

The problem boils down to painting’s reliance on that one joke. Once the novelty of a threatening snowman fades, there isn’t much in the background to keep the eye busy. The mountains and streaks across the sky imply familiar shortcuts for a winter scene. The flat purple scarf is a good colour choice, but it doesn’t quite have enough presence to draw attention away from the busy hat.

Friend or Foe is the more ambitious painting. Rendering the surrounding faces as unfilled outlines rather than fully realised figures is the work’s real achievement. Turning a formal choice into a discussion about presence without substance, familiarity without knowledge.

It, however, strains in the central figure’s expression. It’s pitched at a flatness that poses ambiguity rather than lived uncertainty. The colour handling redeems the confusion. The changes from cool green to warm violet do the emotional work her face doesn’t, and the hot pink of her top keeps her legible as the one solid thing in a room full of half-drawn people.