After Rakajoo's solo exhibition last year at the Palais de Tokyo, discover the new works of the French painter, inviting us on a visual journey through his “Quatres chemins”.
Drawing from his personal life, Rakajoo’s work reveals fragments of his daily life, both in its most trivial and grandiose aspects, but always with distance and restraint. He creates seemingly ordinary life scenes (urban landscapes, portraits of loved ones or himself), but the details, mischievously scattered like clues across the canvas, give his painting multiple layers of meaning.
Delving into these works is to engage in a reflection on topics as intimate as universal, personal as well as political. As Hugo Vitrani, the curator of the exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo, points out “Rakajoo's painting finds its roots in this Afropean soul characterized by duality and pluralism: a story about being African, European and both at once without discontinuity.”
Places, whether inhabited or passed through, occupy a central place in the artist's work. Places whose names have often lost their original meaning as they entered common language, and which he enjoys making us hear again.
After "Les Trois Châteaux", a personal evocation of the neighborhoods of Château Rouge, Château d’Eau, and Châtelet, Rakajoo presents this time a new series of works under the theme of "Les Quatre Chemins".
"Quatre Chemins": the name of an old suburb in northeastern Paris, but also a way of signifying, both concretely and symbolically, that it is there, at this crossroads, that he has chosen to stand and invite us to join him.
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Both a painter, illustrator, and creator of animated films, Baye-Dam Cissé, also known as Rakajoo, is a multifaceted artist who does not hesitate to draw inspiration from techniques in various disciplines and combine them.
Since his first solo exhibition at the Danysz gallery in 2021, Rakajoo's journey has already seen several achievements: a solo exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in 2023 after winning the 2022 Prix des Amis from the same museum, the preparation of a comic book with Casterman, and the participation in the major group exhibition "Les Mondes Souterrains" at the Louvre-Lens in 2024.
For this new solo exhibition, his multimedia works, canvases, comic book pages, and videos occupy all three levels of the gallery.
