Pascal Konan Côte d’Ivoire, b. 1979
Ivorian painter working on denim, bleaching figures out of an indigo ground and linking them with thin ink threads that trail off into nothing.
Pascal Konan (b. 1979, Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire) lives and works in Abidjan, where he teaches painting at the National School of Fine Arts, from which he graduated. He works on denim, using the dark support as a ground from which bleach removes colour before acrylic and Chinese ink shape fragmented, dancing human forms. Staging the daily life of Abidjan’s inhabitants, he interprets the particular emotion produced by African cities through their affluence and their exuberant profusion of sounds and smells. He won the UEMOA prize at the 10th DAK’ART biennial in 2012 and the Christian Latier prize in 2014.
Pascal Konan's whole approach thus lies both in the exaltation of a happy childhood spent in one of the suburbs of Abidjan, but also in the testimony of the precariousness of an Africa grappling with urbanity.
Pascal Konan was born in 1979 in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. A graduate of the National School of Fine Arts in Abidjan, he now teaches painting there while maintaining his own practice. Staging the daily life of the inhabitants of Abidjan, the artist interprets a particular emotion — the one produced by African cities through their affluence and the exuberant profusion of sounds and smells that characterise them.
His whole approach lies both in the exaltation of a happy childhood spent in one of the suburbs of Abidjan and in the testimony of the precariousness of an Africa grappling with urbanity. The search to understand the human soul leads him to explore the streets of Côte d’Ivoire looking for collective life, and for the spirit that handles the game between what is open to the eye and what is hidden below — how identities develop from interactions, and how movement begins as public, becomes private, and returns to the public again.
Materially, the work is made as much by removal as by addition. Konan paints on denim, using the dark support to create powerful effects with bleach before applying acrylic and Chinese ink. The interplay of denim and bleach produces a nuanced spectrum from light to dark; the ink and acrylic then shape fragmented human forms, dancing bodies drawn from contemporary dance and Renaissance iconography, set against tactile, textured grounds. He also works with recovered electronic waste on plywood. Both the bleach and the e-waste carry an environmental charge, standing for pollution and poor environmental management.
Konan’s work reflects on interior and exterior lives, using the relationship to space as a source of belonging, where the African street serves as a metaphor for identity in continuous movement and the private and public spheres are hardly divided into separate concepts. In a context where social divisions and the degradation of the human condition are accentuated, he advocates through his work for individual action as the way to make humanism concrete.
He has been awarded several prizes and distinctions. In 2012 he won the UEMOA prize at the 10th DAK’ART biennial, and in 2014 the Christian Latier prize, which granted him a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. He has exhibited in Beirut, Marrakech and Paris, and his solo exhibition Unfinished Symphony was presented at The Melrose Gallery, Johannesburg, in 2025.
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Unfinished Lines
Presented by AOCA in San Francisco, Minnesota Street Project 24 Sep - 24 Oct 2026A line left unfinished is a door held open.Read more
Papytsho Mafolo abandons lines mid-gesture on purpose — a reminder, he says, that artistically he has not arrived. It is an unusually generous idea for a painter to hold: that the work is not sealed, and that the last mark may belong to someone else. Unfinished Lines runs that thought through four practices that, side by side, could hardly look less alike.
What binds them is not subject but method. Each of these artists prepares a surface long before an image appears on it, and each treats that surface as the place where memory is kept.
Mafolo layers gold leaf, printed matter, acrylic and oil into dense surfaces from which hybrid bodies — part human, part animal — rise and dissolve. Working from Brussels, he has spent a career asking what happens to a self that has been written over in someone else's alphabet. The fragmented figure is his answer; the unfinished line is his refusal to let the answer close.
Hussein Salim buries his line instead. Colour is laid on and laid on again, built into impasto so dense the canvas becomes terrain, patterned with a private symbolism drawn equally from the ancient and the immediate. Salim left Sudan as a refugee and moved through the United Kingdom, Germany and Egypt before settling in South Africa; the paintings are not illustrations of that route but sediment from it. For Salim, painting is explicitly a tool for beginning a conversation.
Pascal Konan works by subtraction. He paints on denim, and the first act is bleach — lifting the indigo out of the cloth until a pale, scorched field opens where the image will be. Only then do acrylic and Chinese ink arrive, putting down dozens of small dancing bodies linked by fine threads. Some cross the whole canvas to join two figures. Some leave a figure and simply stop.
Aza Mansongi assembles hers from cut and layered pattern, in compositions that offer no hierarchy and no exit. Her titles say it outright: Sans Issue. No Exit. Boomerang. Nothing resolves; it simply circles and returns.
Four artists whose lines have all been interrupted and rerouted — from Kinshasa by way of Brussels, from Khartoum by way of KwaZulu-Natal, from Abidjan, from Kinshasa by way of Douala. None of those journeys resolved. Each of these practices depends on that.
Which is why the exhibition belongs in this particular week. Nexus exists to build a bridge, and a bridge requires something on both banks. Unfinished Lines is the continent's side of that conversation — offered to the Bay Area not as a statement but as an invitation, four painters holding the line open and waiting to see what San Francisco does with it.
Presented by Art of Contemporary Africa at Minnesota Street Project, Dogpatch, 24 September to 24 October 2026. A participating exhibition in Nexus: SF/Bay Area Black Art Week, 30 September to 4 October. -
Afropop | Celebrating the multiplicity of Pan-African Art
19 Feb - 29 Mar 2026Art of Contemporary Africa Opens in San Francisco with Inaugural Exhibition,Afropop, a Celebration of African ArtistsRead more
Rather than proposing a singular narrative, Afropop embraces multiplicity, much like the continent of Africa -
Pascal Konan's Solo Exhibition, Unfinished Symphony.
Pascal Konan's Solo Exhibition, Unfinished Symphony, at The Melrose Gallery 8 February – 28 March 2025 8 Feb - 28 Mar 2025The exhibition emphasises the sacredness of humanity, as Konan's work resonates with spiritual undertones informed by his Christian faith and musical sensibilities. The artist's ability to articulate universal truths through African cosmologies ensures that his work remains deeply rooted yet globally accessible.Read more
