‘IMMIGRATUDINE’
Mostra di LULOLOKO in Pzza Ghiberti/Firenze
venerdi 06-06-08 ore: 11 al 23
‘IMMIGRATUDINE’
When you first see Luloloko’s paintings you feel a story wanting to be told. There’s an initial innocent gaiety, then a sense of family closeness and traditions, a culture working together harmoniously, creating, sustaining a community. His paintings are a result of his dreams, of chaos and of peace. The overall effect suggests that he took ideas, words, colors, and images from lots of different sources and brought them together, like a collage of things he found in his life.
Luloloko observes and interprets life, collecting selected items and organizing them; thus organized it becomes a voice expressing what has been seen. Autobiographical elements are clearly worked into his paintings, which diverse in subject matter, materials and quality, diverge into one universal theme: Africa and its people.
The themes of history and blackness occur throughout his work, evoking a world of innocence, uncertainties and injustice. He shows an urgent interest in painting the black person, as well as his concern with the representation of Africans in European history.
He has an ability to integrate African-European culture, family rituals, political and geographical concerns, and the love of music into a visual language. His work exhibits a need to express his role in the larger world within the ethnic culture of Congo, painting in a quasi childlike primitive style which reaches us in an expression of innocence. His visual and verbal fragments are painted in a mixture of red, black and bold saturated colors. The color of red employed throughout his artwork suggests the mood and warmth of his home country. One can sense the heat of the African sun and the fiery passion of Africa’s people to endure and overcome conflicts.
His color-drenched canvases are peopled with primitive figures wearing mask-like faces, painted against fields jammed with grids, words and imageries. Not only does he possess a bold sense of color and composition, he maintains a fine balance between contradictory forces: urban imagery and primitivism, peril and wit, control and spontaneity.
The artist’s anxious hand is always moving. The oil and acrylic paintings are made from a combination of materials: found objects, carton, soil, gesso and other materials. Paintings unfinished are re-thought weeks, months, years later. Paintings are superimposed over later or earlier works. Its a constant work-in progress until the artist is satisfied with the finished product. But despite a casual innocent appearance, the picture itself is heavily reworked, while maintaining a strict compositional discipline.
I admire Luloloko’s passion for art and his culture. He speaks very little but tells all in his paintings. When you learn of the meaning of the symbols you understand that there is a message of cultural awareness.
Mary Anne Gourmelen/Firenze’08