FEATURED ARTIST
Barkinado Bocoum
Barkinado Bocoum lives and works in Dakar, Senegal. He received his Fine Arts Degree from the renowned ‘Institut des Beaux-Arts de Dakar’ in 2005. A practicing visual artist as well as a professor of design and fashion at the Institute of ‘Coupe Couture et de Mode’ in Dakar, Barkinado continually refines his practice as well as his theory. He is the recipient of many prizes and certifications from prestigious institutes in Germany, Belgium and the UK. Since the beginning of his career in 2001 he has always enjoyed participating in collective exhibitions around the world - aiming to collaborate with and learning from artists working in very different environments from his own. Barkinado was awarded one of the top prizes at the 2009 Dak’ART Biennale for Contemporary African Art. He has held many art residencies in France, Belgium, Germany, Spain, the UK, USA, Morocco and Mali and his work is sought after as he never stops expanding and challenging the very definition and notion of what is contemporary art on the African Continent.
Barkinado’s work often resembles an assembly of mosaics, each a part of something infinitely larger, and each oddly unsettling the other parts and yet coming together in a beautiful whole.The origin of this style of painting is simple in that initially he lacked the resources to purchase proper canvases and so he used simple A4 papers. As he filled each one, he simply added more and more of them, taping them together to create large figurative works. Later he realized that taping them together and off center seems to refract light and images in complex fractured portraits.Though each sheet has its own significance taken together they weave a whole albeit with multiple and distinctive perspectives.
He also partitions his canvases into a series of seeming miniatures in which the lines ascribe figures but they only take on life in juxtaposition with others in a seeming metaphor of the human need for community and connection. The constituent parts of his canvases are angled in abstraction and yet taken together they are detailed and figurative. An additional layer which gives even more meaning to his artistic practice is that the gaze of his subjects is often weary and melancholy - almost as if their incredible beauty is too heavy a load to carry. It is this gaze that lends the added perspective of a peoples gazed upon - looking back at the world in turn seemingly sighing: ‘you can’t even begin to understand me.’
