Jonathan Malanda opens the video below with a greeting to la famille and a simple account of himself: a painter from the Democratic Republic of the Congo who prefers to put a woman in his work. The reason is his mother. It was through women, he says, that she inspired him to paint, and so he honors women, defends the love and the consideration that mothers give to children, and paints them whatever their behavior, whatever their differences of character. Our sisters, our mothers. That, he says, is his work.
Éternité (2024), acrylic on canvas, 100 by 110 centimeters, seats a woman on a plain wooden chair against a deep emerald wall. The floor is pure red. A band of broken color runs behind the chair like a mosaic, leaves push in from the edges, and a storm lantern burns on the floor in the left corner. The woman arches back with both arms raised over her head, hands in her long braids, and the pose hides her face completely. She wears a floral slip sheer to the skin, a gold necklace, a green and orange cloth knotted at the hip, an anklet, pink polish on her fingers and toes. At the right edge, filling it, stands a zebra in blue-gray stripes, head bent low toward her.
His account of the painting is brief. Éternité presents the love between man and nature, and for that, he says, he put a woman, plants, and the multicolor you see here; together they show the love and the ambiance between the two. He does not mention the zebra. It takes up a third of the canvas, and its lowered head is the one place where the love he describes has a direction. Nature, in this painting, leans in.
The face is the other thing the video leaves alone. Malanda hides it completely: the arms cross above her head, and whatever expression she wears stays behind them. It suits what he says about his subject. He paints women, plural, whatever their characters, and a face would make her one woman. Withheld, she can stand for the ones he names: the mothers, the sisters, every temperament among them. What eternity means here, he does not say. The lantern in the corner is lit anyway, and stays lit.
More on Jonathan Malanda at kitokongo.art.