Pascal Konan Côte d’Ivoire, b. 1979

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.