J'Aime La Couleur
Provenance : [Propriété non datée]
- Chéri Samba left his home village of Kinto M'Vuila in 1972 aged 16
- He travelled to Kinshasa where he was employed as a draughtsman for an advertising agency
- Billboards across the city sported works by self-taught artists such as Bodo, Mass, Cherin and Moke
- These painters greatly influenced the young Samba
- However, he soon differentiated himself by incorporating text in his work
- He later described this as the 'Samba signature':
- 'I had noticed that people in the street would walk by paintings, glance at them and keep going
- I thought that if I added a bit of text, people would have to stop and take time to read it, to get more into the painting and admire it.'
- Samba prefers to work on a large scale in vivid colours
- It is important to the artist that his works are impressive and can be easily seen from a distance
- He began to incorporate glitter in the late 1980s for this very reason
- This harks back to his training as a sign-painter, but also suggests his desire to create 'popular' pictures
- For Samba, art should be enjoyable for all, not only the knowledgable
- He continues to retain a studio in the city despite having become an international name
- Samba frequently depicts himself in his works
- He claims that art is inherently autobiographical:
- 'Whether or not the subject of the paintings involves me directly, I still prefer to appear in them
- Why should I put someone else's face instead of my own when I'm the one painting, they're my ideas and I'm the one deciding on the subject and comments?'
- J'aime la couleur the artist's head is portrayed as a winding spiral against a nightsky
- He holds a dripping paintbrush between his teeth
- The work is an expression of how Samba experiences the world:
- 'Colour is everywhere
- To me, colour is life
- Our heads must twirl around as if in a spiral to realise that everything around us is nothing but colours
- So I say 'I like colour' instead of saying 'I like painting'
- Colour is the universe, the universe is life, painting is life.'
- Magnin (ed.), J'aime Cheri Samba, exh. cat., (Paris, 2004) pp.15, 30 & 126
