"Staying In Touch With Yesterday" Painting

I was born in Libreville, Gabon, and have lived between different cultures and geographies for much of my life. Painting has become a way for me to think about what we carry with us—memory, tenderness, joy, history—and how those things quietly inhabit our everyday lives.

I paint primarily Black figures, often in moments that might otherwise pass without ceremony: reading on a sofa, sitting with someone you love, being cared for, doing absolutely nothing. I am interested in the idea that an ordinary life is never really ordinary. A quiet room can hold history. A gesture between two people can hold generations. Joy can be pleasure, but it can also be inheritance, resistance, even a way of surviving.

Color is one of the ways I get there. I love saturated interiors, pattern, flattened space and the tension between a figure and the world around them. I am influenced by the freedom and audacity of modern painting, while questioning what happens when Black lives, memories and bodies occupy spaces from which they have historically been absent.

I am not interested in asking my subjects to perform for the viewer. They don't need to explain themselves, prove their strength or turn every moment into a statement. Sometimes they are simply allowed to be.

That, increasingly, is where I find the most interesting stories.