Junior Bile talks about this painting in his own words in the video below. He introduces himself as Mpisango Bile Junior, a Congolese painter who lives and works in Kinshasa, and in a few minutes he gives you the whole method: photograph the children of his neighborhood, rework the image, cover their skin in stenographic script. Watch it first. Most of what follows comes straight from it.
La Croyance dans l’Ombre (“Faith Amid the Shadows,” 2022), oil and acrylic on canvas, 130 by 140 centimeters, shows two boys from the quartiers populaires of Kinshasa. One stands behind in an orange jacket and jeans. The other sits in front of him in round pink sunglasses and a knotted scarf, a glass raised to his mouth. Around them Bile has painted the inventory of an ordinary street corner: two bottles on a small table draped with an embroidered cloth, a pair of worn pink Crocs, a sack printed PPC, a conch shell. Two things in the scene are not ordinary at all. A circular stamp presses over the upper half of the canvas like a postmark, reading un temps marqué par des événements malheureux around the word néfaste. And in the lower corner sits a small globe pierced with nails.
The boys’ skin carries the same script that fills the blue ground behind them. This is the core of Bile’s practice. He photographs children from his neighborhood, builds an aestheticized image from the photograph, then, in his own word, scarifies it with stenographic writing. The writing veils his thinking and exposes it at the same time. He calls the marks vows, prayers, and scars, addressed to the destiny of these children so that their dreams may be granted.
The thinking itself concerns adults. Bile describes his work as a window of escape for the adult whose childhood visions have been worn away by the demands of modern life. Every child, he says, aspires to become someone. Most never arrive. He names the causes without decoration: the antivaleurs people carry in themselves, and the systems of those who hold power, realities that did not begin yesterday. The child in his paintings is the one who still believes in his own goal without knowing what stands in front of him. To return to that state, for Bile, is a way of freeing oneself from a situation he calls grave and desperate.
He does not say which events the stamp records. The painting is dated 2022 and the nailed globe makes its own suggestion, but the canvas keeps the diagnosis general: a harmful time, pressed onto the scene like an official seal, while the two boys drink and pose inside it. That is the belief of the title. The shadow is everything around them.
More on Junior Bile: Junior Bile’s Profile