A man beams out of the canvas. Behind him, Paris. The Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, scenes of the city’s life, all drawn in thin, pale lines, like a sketch nobody finished. He is the only thing fully painted: a green halo, an orange jacket blooming with sunflowers. The title settles whatever question the composition raises. Kin eza mboka na nga: Kinshasa is my city. Nsangu puts it more plainly himself: “On ne trouve mieux que chez soi.” There is no better place than home.
He explains both the method and the man in the video:
Winnart Nsangu usually paints faces without eyes or noses. “I work on the concept of resilience,” he says, “because I always say it: three people out of four live through tragedy.” He is specific about what that means: some people carry traumas that push them toward suicide, and his smiles are aimed at exactly those people. His figures answer that arithmetic with reassurance. Mouths undisturbed by whatever the missing eyes might have said, joy he wants to spread like a positive contagion.
Which makes this painting the exception that explains his rule. Here the eyes are the loudest thing on the canvas. They bulge through a pair of rose-tinted glasses, pushing past the lenses as if the tint couldn’t hold them. Whether the rose is for Paris or for the Kinshasa he remembers, the painting doesn’t say. The smile stays on message. The eyes have somewhere else to be.
There’s an old habit in European painting of doing this the other way around: the African subject as the sketch, the study, the type, set against a solid and fully real city. This painting reverses who gets to be real. Paris lends its monuments and stays an outline. Everything saturated in the picture comes from somewhere else.
Winnart has been part of Kitokongo from the beginning, and not quietly. He is as much performer as painter: his exhibition Resilience put the two side by side, canvases with live performance. He founded the Kipelo collective in 2019, and his work has traveled from the National Museum of the DRC to France, Norway, Côte d’Ivoire, and Belgium.
The painting is now in a private collection. More of Winnart Nsangu’s work is on his profile.