Alex Nwokolo's Alaye takes as its starting point a figure whose cultural specificity is immediately legible and whose formal treatment transcends any single reading. The title is Yoruba colloquial for a man of the streets, a self-made individual navigating the world on his own terms, and Nwokolo renders this subject with a Cubist-inflected approach to the face that owes something to the formal experiments of the Zaria Art Society and to the example of Ben Enwonwu, while remaining distinctly the artist's own. The broken planes of red, green, and black are assembled into a portrait of startling psychological presence. Nwokolo works on a textured canvas surface, which adds a tactile dimension that photographs cannot fully convey and that rewards physical proximity to the work. At 52 x 48 inches, Alaye commands considerable physical presence. The work was created in 2021 and reflects the generation of Nigerian painters who came of age in the era of the contemporary African art market's international expansion, bringing a deeply local visual vocabulary to a global audience.