Each layer is applied, then torn and stripped away: the figures of the forgotten emerge like memories that the city keeps trying to erase.
Armand Boua (b. 1978, Abidjan, Ivory Coast) is a painter whose work confronts the human condition through the lives of the street children of his hometown, where he continues to live and work. He studied painting at the École des Beaux-Arts in Abidjan and at the Centre Technique des Arts Appliqués, later completing training in graphic art.
Boua's practice is inseparable from his materials. He works with tar and acrylic on found cardboard, the flattened boxes that Abidjan's street children use as makeshift shelters, so that the support itself carries the memory of the lives it depicts. Layers are applied, then cleaned, torn, scratched and stripped away, leaving abstract shapes from which fragmented figures emerge and recede. The result balances heavy gesture and violent execution against a smooth, almost tender treatment of the subject: crowds of children whose faces meld together, silhouettes suspended between presence and erasure, portraits that behave like memories the city keeps trying to cancel. His work was profoundly marked by the violence that followed the disputed Ivorian presidential election of 2010, when many children were separated from their families and drawn into the precarious life of the streets. Later series have extended his attention to other invisible protagonists of urban life, from the young labourers of Abidjan's construction sites to the informal workers who sustain the city.
Boua gained international attention with his participation in the Dak'Art Biennale in 2010, followed by his first solo exhibition at Jack Bell Gallery, London, in 2014 and by his inclusion in "Pangaea II: New Art from Africa and Latin America" at the Saatchi Gallery, London, in 2015. Since then he has held solo exhibitions at Jack Bell Gallery, London, Galerie Cécile Fakhoury, Abidjan and Dakar, Ethan Cohen Gallery, New York, where "Forgotten People" (2021) marked his American solo debut, and the Montresso Foundation, Morocco. In 2022 he was selected again for Dak'Art and represented Ivory Coast in the national pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale. His paintings have also been shown at the Vestfossen Kunstlaboratorium, Norway, and in "Africa Supernova" at Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort (2023).
His works are held in the permanent collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Mohammed VI Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rabat, as well as in the Saatchi Collection, London, the Franck-Suss Collection, Hong Kong, the Tiroche DeLeon Collection, Israel, and the Montresso Foundation, Morocco. He lives and works in Abidjan.