On April 18th, 2018, PIASA will present superb works of contemporary African art for sale. Amongst these will be an oil on canvas by Congolese artist Chéri Samba. Born in 1956 in Kinto M’Vuila, 80 km away from Kinshasa, he creates paintings, multiples, and sculptures, and his pieces can now be found in the collections of the MoMA and the Centre Pompidou.
Chéri Samba’s pictures mix French and Lingala text with a wide range of colors and paillettes, softening the seriousness of the discourse, which touches upon social phenomenon, sexuality, inequality, religion, or African cultural heritage, as in the painting ‘Harmonique’ presented for sale.
Chéri Samba’s artistic passion was precocious: “very small, I was always trying to draw attention. My favorite game was to doodle in the sand; later I tried to draw comic books I would sell to other students. I copied drawings and caricatures from entertainment magazines.” In 1972, this blacksmith’s son left his village for Kinshasa at 16 in order to become a painter for advertising signs., He simultaneously worked for the Congolese entertainment magazine Bilenge Info and opened his studio in 1975, achieving recognition thanks to the large distribution of the periodical in Congo. At this period he developed his style combining painting and text, in order to stand out. “I thought that all their beautiful paintings, you look at them in the blink of an eye and you go on. If people are like me, a slow reader, they’ll spend hours and hours understanding and will stay in front of the picture.” He himself becomes a commentator and depicts himself in his works at the end of the 1980s; its is at this time Chéri Samba attained international recognition, participating in the Magiciens de la Terre exhibit in the Centre Pompidou in 1989.
Today, the artist lives between Kinshasa and Paris, and his work is regularly showcased, for example in the 2007 Venice Biennale or the Louvre exhibit A Short History of the Future, in 2015.
