Gédéon Ndonda introduces himself in the video below in two sentences: his name, and his commitment. He is engaged, he says, in painting in the style populaire. What he wants from this canvas takes him one more sentence. Everyone, African or European, can awaken the consciousness buried inside them, and he asks the African population in particular to wake up and take their destiny into their own hands. Merci beaucoup, and the video is over. The brevity is its own portrait.
Le Réveil d’un Géant (“The Awakening of a Giant”), oil on canvas, one meter square, is packed to the edges. At the center, haloed in yellow, stands an elder with glowing eyes, a striped headband, and a white beard, and where his chest should be the painting opens onto a blue panel of binary code with circuit traces running out of it in every direction. Beneath the panel a giant hand lies open, palm up, against a skyline of golden circuitry. Around this core Ndonda stacks his cast: a second giant hand balancing the Earth on its fingertips, a man working at a laptop in midair, a blue figure seated on a golden pyramid among the planets, a man with a lightbulb for a head and a skirt of fresh leaves over his jeans reaching toward the circuit, a spoked magenta sun, a fly agaric mushroom with an old man’s face for a stem. At the right edge, an old merman with white hair and a red-scaled tail raises a long pale horn to his lips.
Ndonda’s sentence about destiny is painted as literally as it could be. Destiny in your own hands: one hand holds the world, the other waits open under the code, ready to take what the circuit delivers or to offer it up. The rest of the picture runs on the same pairings. Leaves over denim. A bulb where a head should be. The elder’s eyes lit the same yellow as his halo and the golden city behind the palm. Nothing traditional in the painting is displaced by the technology beside it; each is wired to the other, sometimes inside one body.
He came to this manner the long way. Ndonda began with childhood sketches, passed through the Académie des Beaux-Arts and the tutelage of Claude Bosana, and moved from portraits to the crowded scenes he paints now, where the real and the imagined share the frame and the subjects are political as often as not. Away from the easel he mentors younger painters and wants art in Congo to be understood and valued differently, starting with the people the art world tends to overlook. The buried consciousness he speaks of in the video is also a professional program: he intends to wake it one student at a time.
Ndonda answers to two names for what he does, and claims both. One is the Jérôme Bosch of Africa, a title he carries willingly and the crowding justifies. The other, given in the video, is the style populaire, the Kinshasa tradition where hybrid bodies and moral allegory have been at home since the 1970s and where a picture is expected to argue. In his hands the two agree: academy finish, popular appetite, Boschian crowds. Every awakening needs its alarm, and Ndonda paints one: an old man with a fish’s tail, standing at the edge of the scene with his horn already raised, already blowing.
More on Gédéon Ndonda: Gédéon Ndonda’s Profile