Congolese Popular Painting

In the early 1970s, a circle of self-taught sign painters and comic-strip illustrators working the avenues of Kinshasa turned their billboard trade into a new form of fine art — bold, textual, and addressed directly to the people who walked past it every day (...)

The movement that came to be known as Congolese Popular Painting, or peinture populaire, took shape in the newly independent Democratic Republic of Congo (then Zaïre), as artists sought a visual language to describe the country's own history, politics and daily urban life, rather than borrowing the conventions of European fine art or the abstractions expected of "African art" by foreign collectors.

At the centre of this circle was Chéri Samba, who at sixteen left school to apprentice with the sign painters of Kinshasa's Avenue Kasa-Vubu. There he found Moke and Pierre Bodo already at work, and the three — soon joined by Chéri Chérin and others — began painting on sacking cloth, canvas being too costly, filling their compositions with the bright colours and blunt clarity of commercial billboard art. In 1975 Samba opened his own studio at the corner of Kasa-Vubu and Birmanie, and it was around this time that he introduced the device for which the movement became best known: painted text, borrowed from the speech bubbles of comic strips, layered directly onto the canvas to spell out, in the artist's own words, exactly what was on his mind.

The paintings that resulted are, by design, not meant to be merely admired: they are meant to be read. Scenes of street life, corruption, sorcery, family life, sexuality and current affairs are labelled, captioned and commented upon in the artists' own hand, closing the distance between the image and the viewer that more conventional painting tends to preserve. As Samba himself put it, the texts translate the thoughts of the people depicted in a given situation.

The movement gained formal recognition in 1978, when the International Congress of Africanists staged the first official exhibition of Congolese popular painting in Kinshasa, drawing academically trained artists such as Chéri Chérin toward the style and cementing its place as a distinct school. Pierre Bodo, working under the name Art Bodo, became known for paintings that doubled as moral chronicles, often addressing the practice of sorcery directly, while Moke continued to chronicle the everyday rhythms and spectacle of Kinshasa life until his death in 2001.

Decades on, the school's founding generation has largely passed, but its populist voice, its bright palette and its habit of speaking plainly to its audience continue through younger Kinshasa painters, among them Jean-Paul Nsimba Mika, who carries the tradition into the present.

AFRICAN|CONTEMPORARY features several artists from this movement, including Chéri Samba, Chéri Chérin, Art Bodo, Peintre Moke and Jean-Paul Nsimba Mika, with original works available to view, discover and acquire directly from the gallery.