Joseph Dimi, b. 1921
Biography

Joseph Dimi was born in 1921 in the Republic of the Congo (Congo-Brazzaville). Like his contemporary Marcel Gotène, he trained under Pierre Lods, the French artist who in 1951 founded the École de Peinture de Poto-Poto in Brazzaville, adopting the school’s free, deliberately unacademic method, which encouraged self-taught African artists to paint directly from imagination and memory.

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).

His paintings, dated into the 1980s, remain in private collections across Europe and continue to surface through specialist dealers and auction houses of African modern art.

source: École des peintres de Poto-Poto (Wikipédia); Proantic; Selency; Saguaro Gallery