Gopal Dagnogo

Gopal Dagnogo was born in 1973 in Abidjan, Ivoiry Coast to an Ivoirian father and a french mother. His desire to creat and his interest for painting are present since his childhood. He was only in hight school when he move to France. He settled in Bordeaux where he continued to study. He obtained a diploma in visual arts. After this period, he went back to Africa in 1997, first in Ivoiry Coast and then in Burcina Faso. He lived in Ouagadougou where he learnt the traditional bronze techniques for three years. Enriched by this experience between art and crafts, Gopal returned to France but this time to Paris. In 2001, he distanced himself from painting and worked in an administration office. This parenthesis that ended in 2008 was for him a way to experience the reality of our society based on work value and its strangeness. It nourished his reflection and enabled him to become aware of the contradictions that caracterized our societies. The violence of our time, the alienation through work, the absurdity of unbridled consumption are themes of the work of Gopal Dagnogo. His paintings are the result of an intuition, the creation of hands that the artist lets express himself on the canvas.

Against social norms that consecrate work as a structural value of human existence, painting is a game for the artist. Once completed, the work retains the freedom and recreational energy of the almost automatic creative process with which it was conceived. The use of a vibrant palette of colors and the precise line give life to hybrid still lifes composed of various objects referring to fragments of daily life. In this pile of objects, we can indentify the double culture of its creator.

The empty bottles, gallinaceous and other animals lost in the canvas evoke a street of Abidjan, the silhouettes of Louis XV armchairs remind us a Parisian bourgeois interior. Some objects, like pairs of sneakers, have a more ambiguous place, they do not belong to any specific imaginary but constitute a common imaginary, globalized. These objects are signs of the language that the artist uses to tell the story of our time. To tell this period, he paints the meeting between cultures, between tradition and modernity, between the rural world and the city world. Almost always, the human figure is absent from his canvases although Humanity is the main subject.

Since 2010 Gopal has participated in numerous exhibitions in Africa, Europe, the USA and Asia. Recently, he participated in the 11th and 12th Dakar Biennials in Senegal, Dak’Art (2014 and 2016), the 1st Biennial of Kampala in Uganda (2014), the 5th Maiden Tour Festival in Baku, Azerbaijan (2014). ).

Gopal has also been invited to various artist residency programs, including ART OMI New York (2014). Some of his works are in public and private collections, including the Lisser Art Museum in Sassenheim, the Netherlands.