Phinet Kisimba introduces himself in the video below as a painter, a photographer, and a cameraman, then sets the other two aside: here he speaks as a painter. His subject is la mathématique du temps, the mathematics of time. Time is the precious element, he says, the witness of every human being and every object. If someone existed somewhere, time will come and certify it. Watch the video first.
Sala Po Ozala (“Work to Become,” 2021), oil on canvas, 90 by 160 centimeters, is built as a clock face. A twelve sits at the top of the canvas, a six at the bottom, a nine and a three at the edges, all in the same gold against Kisimba’s heavy palette-knife ground of reds, browns, and white light. Inside the dial stands a young Kinois, head tipped back, face raised. The clothes are exact: white shirt open at the collar, sleeves rolled, dark trousers, black shoes polished to a shine. Both trouser pockets are pulled inside out. At his feet, two digging tools wait in the paint.
The pockets carry the argument. They are turned out because they hold nothing. No money, no trade, no work, and above the empty linings a wardrobe fitted to the centimeter. Kisimba painted this, he says, after watching part of Kinshasa’s youth live as if time were abundant when the truth is that there is very little of it. Distraction fills the gap. These are young men who cannot manage to go out and find money but want to dress, to appear, and nothing more. The verb he uses is se saper, the verb of la Sape. The funny part, he adds, is that the clothes may not even be theirs. His conclusion is blunt: this youth has to be woken up and put to work, to hard work, instead of standing around complaining and performing someone they are not.
Under the accusation sits an appeal. Kisimba says he is calling on everyone, and not only the young, to be true, to be who you are, because time will come and testify to it. Le temps, on ne le trompe pas, he ends: time cannot be fooled. The canvas carries the warning further than the words do. The numbers wait at their stations, the clock has no hands, and the man inside it does not feel the hour moving. He looks upward as if his time were still ahead of him. The tools at his feet are patient. They are the tools that dig graves, and they will be used whether he works or not. That is the sad part of the painting, and it is the truth for most of Kinshasa’s young: nothing in the pockets, everything in the clothes, and the time only noticed once it has run out.
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