Billy Gibula introduces himself in the video below as a painter of Congolese origin, and readers of this site should know one more thing about him: he is one of Kitokongo’s founders. The painting comes with a plain intention. He wanted, he says, to raise awareness among the different tribes: not to separate, not to withhold love from a person who is not of your tribe. He aims the message at Africans in particular, because here in Africa, he says, many people have no love for those outside their own tribe. He also names his technique on camera: acrylic and oil on canvas.
The ground of the painting is black, covered edge to edge with large orange signs, angular and repeating, like a script no one can read. Against it stands the figure. His shirt is a print in magenta, yellow, and blue, patterned like festival cloth. His head is a wooden mask, pale and elongated, its eyes two ringed holes, its mouth open on carved teeth, the surface pocked with small holes the way old wood is. A long pale beard falls from the chin of the mask to his waist. A purple parrot grips his shoulder. Across his chest he holds a rolled banner reading NON AU TRIBALISME in purple capitals, and below the banner, in a hand marbled with every color on the canvas, a machete. On that wrist, a gold watch. The signature dates it: 2023.
The painting states its message twice. Once in writing, on the banner. Once in the arrangement, which places just beneath the banner the tool with which tribal hatred has done its work in this region within living memory. The machete stays low, flat in the many-colored hand, under the gold watch, and the composition leaves it there: refusal in writing above, the instrument at rest below, and between them a choice.
One more object is worth naming, and it is the mask. It is exactly the kind of thing a European museum would file under a tribe’s name, and Gibula sets it on the shoulders of a man refusing tribes. Worn here, it reads as inheritance rather than label, an old face lent to a new argument. The parrot he leaves unexplained; the video does not mention it. His words there are simpler than any of this. We are all humans, he says, all of the same family. Love must reign between us.
More on Billy Gibula: Billy Gibula’s Profile
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