Caravaggio in Cameroon: under the leaves of the plantation, the deposition and the annunciation become scenes of everyday African life.
Marc Padeu (b. 1990, Melong, Cameroon) graduated from the Institute of Fine Arts of the University of Douala at Nkongsamba, in the agricultural region of Haut-Penja, where coffee and above all bananas are grown for export to Europe. The years spent among families who have worked the plantations for generations gave him both his subject and his mission: to bring to the fore the faces of those who remain in the shadow of a globalized product, without reducing them to their labour. In Padeu's hands the plantation becomes a metaphor for life itself: sowing, tending, harvesting and beginning again, season after season, as the cycles of existence unfold.
The fundamental content of Padeu's work is the sacred, yet his painting cannot be called religious. Images of madonnas and saints, references to the Deposition of Christ, the Annunciation or Caravaggio's "Incredulity of Saint Thomas" become a pretext for portraying the vicissitudes of humankind: religious icons appear in contemporary clothing, and the splendid lesson of Renaissance painting is Africanized in the fabrics of the robes, the colour of the skin, the intensity of the light. From the old masters, whom he studies with a historian's passion, the artist draws an ideal humanity, the absolute form of an existence that in the present is limited and relative, restoring to everyday scenes the scale and dignity of history painting. His method is quasi-documentary: he meticulously restages on location scenes he has witnessed, photographs them, and rebuilds them on canvas in monumental formats, with singular framings that lend his painting a photographic spontaneity and an intense, sometimes Impressionist-inflected palette. Works such as "La Vierge bleue" (2018) condense this system of references, in which European iconography is diverted to question the complexity of the West's relations with Africa.
Padeu held his first UK solo exhibition, "The Blue Man of Njombé", at Jack Bell Gallery, London (2020), followed by "All the Light on Me" (2021) and "Femmes dans la plantation" at Cromwell Place (2022), accompanied by a talk with the art historian Jennifer Sliwka, after their public conversation "Caravaggio in Cameroon" (2021). He has held solo exhibitions at Peres Projects, Berlin, and Peres Projects, Milan ("Dans la plantation", 2023), at Doual'art, Centre d'art contemporain, Douala, and "Le baptême de Roxane" at Larkin Durey, London (2024). His work has been exhibited at the Musée National de Yaoundé and the Galerie Nationale d'Art Contemporain, Yaoundé, in "Redefining the Trend: Histories in the Making", curated by Christine Eyene (2021), and in "When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting" at Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town (2022-2023), among the landmark surveys of contemporary Black figuration. In Italy he was presented in "Cameroon: Visions and Convergences" at Black Liquid Art Gallery, curated by Antonella Pisilli (2022), the exhibition dedicated to the new generation of Cameroonian artists born in the 1990s. His work has been acquired for the permanent collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada. He lives and works between Douala and Nkongsamba.