Joseph Dimi, 1961–2009
Biography

Joseph Dimi was born in 1961 in Ngania, in the Republic of the Congo (Congo-Brazzaville). He joined the École de Peinture de Poto-Poto in Brazzaville at the age of fifteen. Founded by Pierre Lods in 1951, the school encouraged artists to develop their own visual language, drawing on imagination, memory and everyday life.

According to the Art in Embassies catalogue, Dimi reportedly began drawing visions recalled after a coma, an experience that helped shape his imagery. Prizes later took him to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and he participated in more than twenty exhibitions internationally.

His colourful compositions draw on Congolese symbolism: fish evoke motherhood, gourds healing, drums dance, and elephants the spirits of the forest.

Dimi became one of the recognised painters of the Poto-Poto school, portraying — in the words used to describe his subject matter — the shimmering world of villages, hunts, wars, dances and the savanna. His paintings continue the school’s characteristic idiom of flat, decorative compositions in bright oil and gouache, populated by stylised human and animal forms suspended between the real and the fantastical. Like many of his fellow Poto-Poto painters, he signed his canvases with the initials “PPP” (Peintres de Poto-Poto).

Dimi died in 2009. His paintings remain in private collections across Europe.

source: Art in Embassies, U.S. Embassy Brazzaville collection catalogue, pp. 67–68 (birth, training and artistic practice); CESBC; Selency