François Thango, 1936-1981
Biography

François Thango was born in 1936 in Brazzaville, Republic of the Congo, and died in 1981. He studied at Brazzaville's School of Fine Arts and began painting in the 1950s, first exhibiting his work in 1956 as one of the first generation of young Congolese painters to gather around Pierre Lods at the newly founded École de Peinture de Poto-Poto.

In 1958, Lods selected Thango to represent the Poto-Poto school at the Exposition Universelle in Brussels. From 1959 to 1972 his work developed further under the mentorship of Maurice Alhadeff, leading to six of his paintings being shown in New York in 1961. Rather than working at an easel, Thango painted on large canvas rolls laid flat, sketching each composition in pencil beforehand, often drawing inspiration from wanderings in the forest. His paintings are built from flat, monochrome fields of colour encircled by thick black outlines, combining animals, plants, monster figures and stylised masks into a single scene; like his fellow Poto-Poto painters, he signed his work with the initials “PPP” (Peintres de Poto-Poto). He also taught art in Brazzaville, shaping the city's later generation of painters.

His work was shown in “The Birth of Contemporary Painting in Central Africa” at the Royal Museum for Central Africa, Belgium (1992) and in “African Art Now” in Tokyo (1993), following earlier exhibitions at the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris (1989) and a retrospective at the Fondation Cartier (1995). He is featured in the publications Contemporary Art of Africa (1996) and Africa Hoy (1991).

source: askART; Proantic; Caacart; African Contemporary essay on the Poto-Poto School