Marcel Gotène, 1939-2013
Biography

Marcel Gotène was born in 1939 in the Republic of the Congo (Congo-Brazzaville). He was discovered as a young painter by Pierre Lods, the French artist who in 1951 founded the École de Peinture de Poto-Poto in Brazzaville, and trained under Lods’ free, deliberately unacademic method, which encouraged self-taught African artists to paint directly from imagination and memory rather than from a fixed European curriculum.

Gotène became one of the best-known painters to emerge from the Poto-Poto school, working — like his contemporaries Nicolas Ondongo, François Iloki and François Thango — in the school’s characteristic idiom: flat, decorative compositions in bright gouache and oil, populated by stylised human, animal and plant forms suspended between the real and the fantastical. His paintings, often signed with the initials “PPP” (Peintres de Poto-Poto), helped carry the school’s style through the second half of the twentieth century and into museum and private collections across Africa, Europe and the Americas.

He continued to paint and exhibit in Brazzaville until his death in 2013, and remains regarded in the Republic of the Congo as one of the school’s defining figures, alongside its founding generation.

source: Afroculture.net; La Semaine Africaine; Proantic; African Contemporary essay on the Poto-Poto School