Mihalina Nyota Buzilu trained across disciplines. She finished her humanités in ceramics in Lubumbashi, where she was born, then crossed the country for the painting studios of the Académie des Beaux-Arts de Kinshasa. She works in painting, sculpture, and photography now, and writes poetry she has not yet shown anyone; for the moment, she says, it is still for her. Declines to be defined by any single form. Her subject, across all of them, is the inner life.
In the video below, Nyota discusses the symbolism behind her latest work, Pembeni mwa nafsi (Au bord du soi, or At the Edge of the Self): what it takes from the classical vanitas tradition and what she made it carry instead.
The painting is built around a reclining figure, one arm extended toward a small hand mirror. The drapery is warm: peach, ochre, white. The body inside it is not. Nyota paints the skin blue-gray, the temperature of stone, and spends the flesh tones elsewhere, on the human skull resting on a draped stool below. Behind the figure, a dense frieze of drawn silhouettes runs along the top of the canvas: figures, trees, a crown, a bird.
Vanity is the subject, and Nyota handles the word with care. For her it is not a simple fault but a knot of pride, excessive self-confidence, and the craving for admiration, what happens when someone becomes so absorbed in their own image that the meaning of life slips away. A life that should, she says, be received with integrity and gratitude.
The mirror is at the center of this. Taken far enough, self-contemplation becomes a trap. The figure’s gaze is locked on its own face, the surrounding world dropped from view. The pose looks restful. It isn’t.
At the base, the skull. A classical memento mori, the oldest voice in the painting. Nyota is direct about what it addresses: people who forget they will die, who spend their energy appearing more beautiful, more intelligent, more capable than everyone around them. The skull doesn’t argue. It waits, wearing the flesh tones the body has given up.
Worth noting is the line work. Along the top of the canvas and in the ground below, the silhouettes are drawn in felt-tip pen directly on the surface, white traces that read as etched rather than painted. The body, by contrast, is heavy and acrylic-worked, almost too present. (The gap between the two techniques is not incidental.) The drawn forms drift around the solid figure like memories of everything chased: the bird, the crown, the crowd. They belong to the surface of the world, not to a life lived inside it.
The title is Swahili, a quiet trace of Nyota’s Lubumbashi years. Pembeni mwa nafsi means “at the edge of the self.” The phrasing matters. Not painting the self from the outside. She is after the border where looking inward becomes falling in.
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