"Looking at John Hopex's portraits is like stopping time."
John Hopex (John Adenuga Opeyemi, b. 8 November 1992, Nigeria) is a hyperrealist artist based in Benin City. Drawing was his childhood language of imagination, but his path to art was indirect: he first earned a National Diploma in Purchasing and Supply at the Polytechnic of Ibadan (2014), before committing to his vocation and enrolling in Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Benin in 2017, where he obtained his Bachelor of Arts.
Encouraged by his peers, Hopex found his voice in portraiture, falling in love with its ability to bring life, exuberance and colour to the people and places around him. He conceives his artwork as a vessel for amplifying the voices of his community: many of his models are friends, neighbours or strangers he photographs in his Benin City studio, translating the sessions into meticulous sketches and then into larger-than-life portraits. His early charcoal works, rendered entirely in graphite and charcoal with astonishing detail in skin and hair, earned him international attention; his practice has since evolved toward a mixed-media language combining charcoal, acrylic and fabric on canvas, where hyperreal figures emerge from brightly painted backgrounds. Every element, from the look of the model to the costumes, is grounded in African traditional culture, as in the series "Love, Peace and Deceit", conceived to convey the aspirations of love, peace and fulfilment shared across the continent. A personal ritual runs through his career: each year, on his birthday, he paints a self-portrait, reading in every line and mark of his face the story of his journey.
Hopex has taken part in exhibitions and juried competitions within and beyond Nigeria, including the Intergalactic Open 3 (2021), the 13th Annual International Drawing Discourse Exhibition (2021) and ViewPoint 54 (2022). In 2023 he was among the five young Nigerian artists of "Mimesis" at Black Liquid Art Gallery, Rome, curated by Antonella Pisilli, the exhibition that brought the new Nigerian hyperrealism to Italy: his portraits were singled out by critics for their capacity to stop time, offering a precision that turns the real into an imagined, suspended beauty. His work has been featured by My Modern Met, TRT Afrika and THE.CCART, and shown in Nigeria, France and the United State.