Patrick Kusakana introduces himself in the video below as a painter and performer, and names his theme in one word: power. Purely African, ancestral power, and specifically the power of his own people, because he is Mukongo, and among the Bakongo, he says, power carries many symbols that speak, often when the society has problems. The black and white that dominates the canvas, with color intervening across it, is there to express that value as a Mukongo. Born in Kinshasa in 1975, he trained at the Académie des Beaux-Arts and passed through the studio of Roger Botembe.
The queen sits facing us, and her skin is nearly the only warm color allowed. Everything else is drawn: panels of Kongo geometry, checkers, zigzags, spirals, stacked around her like architecture, and long loose black lines that wander over the whole surface, tangling the scene into one web. Two white tusks curve down from her face. Small crosses hang from her ears. Her hair falls in two long ropes past her shoulders to her hands, her dress is cream with black dots, and her arms are spread straight out to either side, a bristled whisk in one hand. Her seat is a red stool with a yellow star at its base. Around her, in ink, an inventory of the forest keeps a polite distance: a patterned moth, a butterfly, a tortoise with a decorated shell, an elephant at her knee, and at the lower left, two small carved figures standing together.
The title names her and the video names the title. La reine Mambueni is Kusakana’s grandmother. She was, he says, a nganga-kisi, the one the family came to when something was wrong, an illness, a trouble in the house; she healed, and she gave the person the solution. The ivory he explains just as directly. Ivory symbolizes the wealth of the animal, the elephant, and the lady is there to protect the animals of the forest, as the villages once did in the old days, when killing them was forbidden. She protects nature, the animals, and people too. Grandmother, healer, keeper of the old prohibitions: the crown is a job description.
What the painting adds to his account is rank. The grandmother arrives enthroned: the stool, the whisk, the spread arms, the geometry stacked like regalia, every element a museum would file as pattern doing the work of office here. The tusks carry the sharpest part of it. The animal’s wealth sits on the face of the animal’s guardian, and where the ivory is, the elephant is safe. Her arms reach as wide as the canvas allows. Everything the wandering lines touch, moth, tortoise, elephant, the carved pair, lies inside their span.
More on Patrick Kusakana: Profile.