Rakajoo: City of Lights

Rakajoo’s Paris is the one of the Moulin Rouge and Montmartre, those popular neighborhoods with festive nightlife. With “City of Lights”, his first solo exhibition in China at Danysz Shanghai, the Parisian artist paints an intimate portrait of his city: a realistic Paris, the Paris known for its spectacular parties and its café terraces, which could be described as a restful asylum, like a reassuring case that allows one to take the time to observe the world through the prism of a glass. 

Rakajoo's Paris is also the link he maintains with the masters of modern art such as Picasso and Toulouse-Lautrec, to whom he pays a penetrating tribute. Inspired by the image of the City of Lights drawn up before him by these illustrious painters who have marked the history of art and who have fed his inspiration, Rakajoo opens the doors of his intimacy, painting the places that are familiar to him, those in which he grew up, those that he has fantasized about and that are dear to him.

The exhibition “City of Lights” postulates that Rakajoo is indeed part of an artistic filiation with these major artists of modernity. Referring to art history, his works are windows onto characters who carry an individual story but are also part of a larger narrative

In his monumental work “Chemins Croisés,” the artist takes us into the mythical Moulin Rouge and we find ourselves in the audience. By the means of his multiple points of escape, he attracts the glance everywhere at once without ever settling. We find ourselves looking for the dancers, following a waiter, then accessing to the most intimate part of the venue: a view of the warm-up in the backstage.

Following the example of Toulouse-Lautrec who also immortalized the Moulin Rouge in his unforgettable paintings, Rakajoo makes us fully live the experience. In front of his work, it becomes possible to feel the contagious gaiety of the French Cancan on which the legs of the dancers rise enthusiastically to the rhythm of the lively music.

While belonging to the French pictorial tradition, Rakajoo also manages to free himself from it to offer something personal and contemporary. If he walks in the footsteps of his predecessors, if he follows the same places, and claims their legacy with fervor and admiration, he does not remain less influenced by the aesthetics of his time by daring to propose an inclusive and innovative form of representation.

It was as a teenager that Rakajoo who grew up near Sacré-Coeur, a Parisian area frequented by artists, discovered the Louvre Museum and the Musée d'Orsay on his own. "I went there very often, it was fascinating. Obviously, after a while, the question of identification arose for me: there are people who want to be able to project themselves onto what they see in the museum. But the love of painting carried me, and I thought I could do something to reconcile these worlds," says the artist. 

Rakajoo gives life to his models and presents a great fresco of today’s life. With his paintings, he takes the floor to better concede it to others. The others are those he meets daily, relatives and people he doesn’t even really know. Based on portraits and testimonies of Parisian people he meets, he invites us to look at the city differently, positioning himself as a "witness" who observes the flows of people that are characteristic of our modern societies. His works are like a portrait of the City of Lights.