Gédéon Ndonda
About
Gédéon Ndonda is a Congolese painter who lives and works in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, and one of the most recognizable voices in the city’s style populaire, the popular painting tradition that expects a canvas to argue. His pictures are crowded and exact: circuit boards open in the chests of haloed elders, giant hands balance the Earth or wait beneath streams of binary code, a merman blows a horn at the edge of a golden pyramid. He answers to a title he claims himself: the Jérôme Bosch of Africa, and the density and strangeness of his scenes back it on sight. Alongside it sits the other name he gives his work: he paints in the style populaire, and his subject is the awakening of a consciousness he believes has been left buried.
He came to painting the long way that many Kinshasa painters know. It began with childhood sketches, continued at the Académie des Beaux-Arts, and matured in Art du Beau, the workshop of Claude Bosana, where he moved from portraits to the elaborate scenes he paints now, in which the real and the imagined share the frame and the subjects are political as often as not. The finish of his canvases carries the academy; their appetite belongs to the street.
His statement painting is Le Réveil d’un Géant, The Awakening of a Giant, an oil on canvas one meter square in which technology and inheritance are wired into single bodies: leaves worn over denim, a lightbulb for a head, an ancestor’s halo above a panel of code. The message he attaches to it in his own words is direct. Everyone, African or European, can awaken the consciousness buried inside them, and Africans in particular should wake up and take their destiny into their own hands.
Ndonda also teaches. He mentors younger painters in Kinshasa and wants art in Congo to be understood and valued differently, beginning with the people the art world tends to overlook. This page exists to make that work easy to find online: his portfolio is gathered below, and the paintings introduce him better than any paragraph can.
Portfolio
