Claude Bosana introduces himself in the video below as artiste graphiste peintre, and both words are earned. Born in Kinshasa in 1980 and known in its art world as Œil d’Aigle, the eagle’s eye, he came to painting by copying cinema posters, trained in fine and graphic arts at the Académie des Beaux-Arts, and in 2007 founded the workshop Art du Beau, through which a generation of younger painters has passed, Gédéon Ndonda among them. His style is a deliberate marriage of the classical and the popular. The painting he presents here, he says, is advice to the people who govern.
The two parties of the fable are dressed for the occasion. On the left, a tiger in a yellow shirt, red suspenders, striped socks, and polished tan shoes, belt buckle the size of a fist. On the right, a bonobo in a red cowboy hat with a spare cigarette tucked in the band, beads at his ear, crocodile boots, and an orange jacket he holds open with one hand, the way a sapeur shows a griffe, to display the label stitched inside: KADI TOZA. Between their two faces burns the single cigarette of the title. Behind them the forest is black and spattered with points of color, parrots on a branch, a felled stump at the edge. On the ground lie the interests they have set aside: green apples, a peeled banana, and grapes at the bonobo’s boots, and behind the tiger’s legs, stretched out in the grass, a dead zebra. The signature dates it 2024.
His account in the video is direct. He wanted two animals that cannot live together, and one interest, the cigarette, that puts them together anyway. He calls the painting advice and then wonders aloud whether it is an exhortation, aimed at, in his careful phrase, the people who hold a portion of authority: try to set your personal interests aside and seek the common interest of the nation. The carnivore has left his meat, he says. The bonobo, who eats fruit, has left his fruit beside him. For the nation. The scene came from watching. He observed smokers, their way of living, of behaving, of sharing a cigarette with passion, and the painting followed.
One thing on the ground resists the hopeful reading. The interests set aside are not equivalent. The fruit sits ripe by the bonobo’s boots and will keep until the cigarette is done. The tiger’s meat is a zebra, stretched dead in the grass behind him. One of the sacrifices offered to the common interest had already cost a life before the sharing began, which is about what the nation knows of the compromises made by the people who hold portions of its authority. Bosana does not say this. His framing stays hopeful, and the painting earns the hope honestly by leaving the carcass in view.
He ends the video apologizing that there was not much time to talk. That was the essential, he says. Pardon. The apology is his own; the advice inside the painting is addressed to people who have taken far more.
More on Claude Bosana: Claude Bosana’s Profile