Phinet Kisimba
About
Phinet Kisimba was born in Kolwezi, Lualaba, on August 14, 1995, and paints in Kinshasa. He is also a photographer and a filmmaker, but the easel comes first, and so does one subject, named in his own phrase: la mathématique du temps, the mathematics of time. His canvases are built with painting knives rather than brushes, oil laid on in ridges thick enough to hold shadow, and when the knife is not enough he reaches for whatever the kitchen offers, forks and spoons included.
The beginning was domestic. His father designed postcards, and the son watched. At school, instructors noticed the talent and called him to the front to illustrate lessons on the chalkboard. That early push carried him to the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Lubumbashi and then to Kinshasa, where he absorbed impressionism and the painting of Lucian Freud, and where the decisive turn came: from replicating what he saw to imagining what he meant.
The work has moved in chapters. In 2018 he painted the human body against smoke: flesh that passes, thought that stays. By 2021 the subject narrowed to time, and specifically to time in the African and Congolese context, where he argues that prosperity and the valuing of the hour are the same question. Kitokongo has featured him twice, the first artist in the Meet the Artwork series to return. Sala Po Ozala puts a well-dressed young Kinois with turned-out pockets inside a clock face with no hands. Rites de Passage turns to the Katangese initiation of girls and the broken transmission between mothers and daughters, a subject he carries from birth: Kolwezi sits in old Katanga.
Art, for Kisimba, is a science. An artist must understand the symbols he uses and the messages they carry, and nothing on a canvas should be there by accident. The rule he applies to painting is the one he preaches about living, and he has said it best himself: le temps, on ne le trompe pas. Time cannot be fooled. This page holds his work in one place online; the portfolio is below, and the hours in it show.
Portfolio
