"The popular painter does almost the same work as the journalist."
JP Mika (Jean-Paul Nsimba Mika, b. 1980, Kinshasa, DRC) is one of the leading figures of the new generation of Congolese popular painting. Trained in the studio of Chéri Chérin and at the Académie des Beaux-Arts of Kinshasa, he moved from the narrative figuration of the popular school toward stylized, joyful portraits painted on flower-patterned fabrics evoking vintage wallpapers, a colour-saturated homage to the great African studio photographers of the 1960s, from Seydou Keïta to Malick Sidibé. The child of N'Djili who painted advertising signs at thirteen triumphed in "Beauté Congo - Congo Kitoko" at the Fondation Cartier, Paris (2015), as the youngest artist in the exhibition, and has since become one of the recognizable faces of contemporary African painting.