"Go and meet this culture, take it, eat it, mix it with what we have, and propose something else."
Franck Kemkeng Noah (b. 1992, Yaoundé, Cameroon) studied at the Institut de Formation Artistique in Cameroon, where he earned his baccalaureate, and at the Institut des Beaux-Arts de Foumban, where he obtained a professional Master's degree, before moving to France in 2017 to pursue a research Master's at the Université de Picardie Jules Verne in Amiens. It was there that he began painting on old rugs: the abandoned household items he discovered on the streets became fresh supports for painting and for a series of sculptures that act as narrative points in the history of migration, objects that carry the memory of the homes they once furnished.
His work, which has been described as hybrid art, is an experimental approach mostly expressed through painting but extending to sculpture, installation and interactive performance. At the heart of his aesthetic investigation lies a distinctive, vibrant perspective on interculturalism, identity and civilization: compositions in which the rituals, masks and architecture of Cameroon meet European monuments, religious iconographies and global media imagery, in bold perspectival constructions where architectural views become the fulcrum of the scene. He cites as his formative reference the Flemish master Jan van Eyck, whose precision, finesse and meticulous detail he admires, and in particular "The Virgin of Chancellor Rolin", a work he copied as a student and whose architectural construction still echoes in his own painting; alongside the Western canon he draws on Matisse, Picasso and Cameroonian artists working on the mask and on the fusion between ancestral and modern memory.
His traditional culture constitutes, in his own words, a true richness and his main source of inspiration, which merges in his creations with what globalization and immigration open up, creating a kind of palace of memory. The conceptual key to his practice is Oswald de Andrade's "Manifesto Antropófago": as the artist explains, one cannot criticize something one has simply accepted; one must instead go to meet the foreign culture that modernity and immigration open up, take it, eat it, mix it with one's own, and propose something new, a new self, a new culture. His work is guided by a question borrowed from the Cameroonian master Pascal Nempa: who are you who does not know yourself?
Kemkeng Noah presented a solo exhibition at the Es-Saadi Palace, Marrakech, on the occasion of 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair (2021), and his works have appeared at international auction. In Italy his work was presented in "Cameroon: Visions and Convergences" at Black Liquid Art Gallery, curated by Antonella Pisilli (2022), the exhibition that introduced the new generation of Cameroonian artists born in the 1990s, where his perspectival compositions of architectural landscapes and monuments were among the defining voices. He also took part in "Decameron Quarantine Art", the gallery's series of video interviews with African artists conceived by Antonella Pisilli during the pandemic lockdown, available on the gallery's channels. He lives and works in France.